The first version of the Wordpress iPhone app showed a lot of promise as mobile blogging tool, but it was too slow and too buggy to use. It didn't know what to do with dropped connections -- all too common, when you're blogging from an AT&T iPhone -- and the UI was clunky and unintuitive. Round 2! Wordpress is back for another try at the iPhone thing, and this time they're far closer to doing it right: bug fixes, persistence, auto-saving and a better UI make Wordpress 2 a viable option for blogging on the go.

The single most important new feature in Wordpress 2 is persistence. That means you can close the app, and reopening it will take you back to the post or comment you were working on. In the old version, it was nearly impossible to finish a long post without being interrupted by a crash or a phone call, or without needing to pop into Safari to grab some text from a webpage. Speaking of those crashes, they're nowhere near as frequent as they were in Wordpress 1, and the new autosave feature makes them less damaging.

Photo uploading is smoother, too, and you can also preview a post while you're editing it. Aside from all the improvements to posting, comments now have their own tab, so you can moderate your site with ease. I'd still love to see liveblogging support in the iPhone app, though, because it seems like such an ideal use of a mobile blog client. All in all, Wordpress 2 is a workable solution for mobile blogging.

This summer the folks at Automattic asked users what features they'd most like to see in the next version of the popular WordPress blogging client. one of the most popular suggestions was image editing, and now it looks lke the developers are beginning to add image editing capabilities to WordPress.

The image editor will be baked into WordPress 2.9 and won't require a plugin. The editing functions are pretty basic. You'll be able to crop, resize, and rotate images. Don't expect support for advanced effects, layers, or other features, at least not right away. But the ability to upload your images before editing them should make blogging a bit faster and easier for many users.

[via Life Rocks 2.0]

Automattic, the company behind WordPress, has acquired a spiffy spellchecker called After The Deadline. It's now available on Wordpress blogs, and you can enable it in the Wordpress visual editor by clicking the ABC button with the green checkmark (If you're using a WordPress.org install, get the plugin). After the Deadline is smarter than the spellcheckers we're used to in desktop apps, because it analyzes the millions of posts on Wordpress.com to create context and get things like proper names right.

After the Deadline finds a lot of mistakes that other spellcheckers won't. If you use "new" instead of "knew," for example, ATD will know whether you've got the right one in context. It can also check for clichés, double-negatives, passive voice, and other problems that generally weaken your writing. ATD also gives you fine-tuned control over those stylistic elements: you can have it stop checking for certain problems, or teach it to ignore your intentional, but technically incorrect, word choices. ATD only works with English right now, but other languages are in the works.

[via TechCrunch]

Several sites are reporting that a major attack on Wordpress blogs started yesterday. The latest version of Wordpress, 2.8.4, is not vulnerable to this particular worm, so upgrading now could save you a lot of headaches. The worm creates a new, hidden administrator account on your blog, allowing whoever's behind this thing to access the guts of your blog, databases and all.

How do you know if your site has been affected? Lorelle on Wordpress offers two possible ways to find out:

There are strange additions to the pretty permalinks, such as example.com/category/post-title/%&(%7B$%7Beval(base64_decode($_SERVER%5BHTTP_REFERER%5D))%7D%7D|.+)&%/. The keywords are "eval" and "base64_decode."

The second clue is that a "back door" was created by a "hidden" Administrator. Check your site users for "Administrator (2)" or a name you do not recognize.

Wordpress has acknowledged the attacks and encouraged users to upgrade their sites. Wordpress.com users aren't affected, as the whole system has already been updated to 2.8.4. If you've already been afflicted by the attack, start on the steps in Wordpress' FAQ.

[via Mashable]

The recent shutdown and reopening of URL-shrinking service Tr.im drew a lot of attention to one of the most troubling questions about short URL sites: when one of them shuts down, what happens to the links? To avoid worrying about what a URL shortener might do with your links, you might want to scope out la petite url, a Wordpress plugin for creating tiny links using your own domain name.

La petite url creates links to your Wordpress pages using 5 lowercase characters, something like yoururl.com/nfpqd. This way, your domain name stays in the URL, letting people know which site they're clicking through to. You can also automatically display a short link next to each post, making it easier for readers to spread your links. The disadvantage? Unless you have a tiny domain name, your shrunken URL is going to be significantly longer than the ones you get from ow.ly, bit.ly or tr.im.

If you've got an eye for design, but lack the proficiency in HTML and CSS to convert your ideas into functional websites, Divine might be for you. It's currently in the beta stage, but it aims to transform Photoshop documents into working Wordpress layouts. There's no coding involved, just selecting the appropriate sections of your PSD layout and assigning them the appropriate parts of the layout.

There are professional services that charge substantial rates to do similar conversions by hand, so a free, automated solution - even a flaky one - would be a big money-saver for non-coding designers who want to play with Wordpress. Divine doesn't seem flaky, though. It claims to produce results that are both SEO-optimized and standards compliant. It's also blessedly free of tables. Certainly, there's no substitute for doing it yourself, but Divine seems to be a reasonable (and free!) way to get started.

If, like me, you've become fairly reliant on Google Gears, the browser plug-in from Google that allows sites to save data for offline access, the release of Firefox 3.5 is probably frustrating you. For some reason, Google isn't on the ball, even though the impending Firefox release was available for aeons in beta.

Luckily, for those of you that are brave (or dumb) enough to install an unofficial version of the Google Gears Firefox extension, you can get your Google Gears goodness going in Firefox 3.5 right now. Lifehacker points us to the unofficial Gears download locations for Windows & Linux, and Mac OS X (Intel only), but had only tested the Windows version at the time they posted about it. I can report that I'm dumb enough to install an unofficial Gears build, and it has so far worked flawlessly on my Mac. I use Gears regularly with Gmail, GCal, GReader, and WordPress, and all are working as expected.

Hopefully Google will hurry up and release an official Gears release for Firefox 3.5, but for now I've got a solution that works. Do you use Gears? If so, do you rely on it? What sites do you use it with?

Wordpress 2.8 may have just hit the streets a month ago, but the folks behind the popular blogging software are already looking ahead to Wordpress 2.9. As usual, the update will likely bring a number of bug and security fixes. But there's are also plans to cram in a few new major features, and the Wordpress team wants to know what items you think should be at the top of the priority list.

It looks like the focus will be on improving the way blogging software lets you handle and edit media files. It's likely that many of the possible features listed in the Wordpress survey could show up in future versions of the software, but the goal of the survey is to help decide which to focus on in time for the next major release.

You can get a sense of what kind of features the developers are considering from the screenshot above, but you can also find more detailed explanations by reading the official Wordpress blog post.

As expected, the folks at Automattic unleashed Wordpress 2.8 on the public this week. If your blog his hosted on Wordpress.com, it should automatically be upgraded. If you have a self-hosted blog running Wordpress 2.7 or a more recent build, you should be able to upgrade from your blog administration pages. Or you can download Wordpress 2.8 if you want to upgrade manually or install the blogging platform from scratch.

There are a ton of changes, bug fixes, and new features, but here are a few of the highlights:

• It's much easier to customize widgets
• The admin pages are significantly more responsive and faster to navigate
• New syntax editor which adds color (literally) to plugin and theme editors
• New theme browser that makes it easy to find and install themes from the admin pages
• Added a Widget API
  

To see some more of the changes, check out the video embedded after the page break.

Popular blogging platform WordPress will get a minor update next week with the launch of version 2.8. The new version should be available to the public starting June 10th.

WordPress 2.8 will have an updated theme browser which makes it just as easy to install and update WordPress themes as it is to find and install plugins. Users will also have more options for customizing their Dashboard widgets and other admin pages. There have also been updates to the ways comments are handled, and WordPress 2.8 adds support for case-insensitive logins.

The other big news out of WordPress is that the developers are planning to merge WordPress MU (multi-user) with the main version of the blogging platform. Right now there are very few differences between WordPress and WordPress MU, and it looks like the MU code will simply be added to WordPress. But that won't happen before WordPress 2.8 is released next week, so expect there to be two different versions for now.

[via the Blog Herald]

Grooveshark is my favorite quick way to listen to a particular song online. With an extensive library, easy sharing and embeddable widgets, it's a powerhouse in the music sharing arena. It's only getting better, too, with the recent addition of a Facebook application and a Wordpress plugin. The Facebook app lets you share songs directly to your wall, and the Wordpress plugin lets you quickly put together a playlist widget for your Wordpress blog.

The Facebook app, in particular, is the easiest way to share music on FB that I've run across so far. In addition to publishing a song to your profile, you can also select individual friends to share it with. With over 10 million songs in Grooveshark's database, it's likely you'll find whatever song you're looking for.

Have you ever wished that you could have someone edit your blog posts for typos, spelling errors and grammatical mistakes? Most of us aren't lucky enough to have someone dedicated to catching and fixing our every mistake.

Rather than asking one person to edit for you, why not effectively enlist the help of all of your blog's readers? That's what the folks at Brave New Code figured, anyway, when they decided to create the gooseGrade WordPress plugin.

The concept is simple: install the gooseGrade plugin on your site. Then when readers are visiting your site and they see something that could be corrected, they click on a Grade This button on your site and enter the correction they believe should be made. As the site's owner you have the final say as to what changes to apply, so this isn't a tool that is going to let people insert spam all over your site.

While the concept is interesting, I have doubts that people will take the time to edit someone else's work online, in particular I have doubts that people will take the time to understand that they even have the capability of suggesting edits. This tool would have to be baked-in to a major blogging platform like WordPress.com or TypePad before I think enough people would understand what is going on to actually make use of it.

I kind of wish that it was, actually, because the idea is appealing. It's just going to take a lot for this idea to reach the critical mass it would need to become successful.

[via Panache]

Intense Debate is a third party comment service for blogging platforms like WordPress, Blogger, and TypePad. Automattic, the company behind WordPress bought the company last year and began adding its features including threaded comments to WordPress. But you can still install Intense Debate for use with other blogging platforms. And now you can also install plugins for Intense Debate that add new features.

For instance, there are already plugins for PollDaddy and YouTube that let users embed polls or videos in blog comments. There's also a Seesmic plugin that lets you record video comments within your web brower.

There's also an API allowing developers to create their own plugins adding other features.

Intense Debate competitor Disqus has also been busy rolling out new features including the ability to tie in social networking comments from FriendFeed, Digg, Twitter, and other sources.

[via Mashable]

I'll give Brad a pass on being a tad premature with the WordPress 2.7's announcement, because I know that he -- like many of us who use WordPress to power our self-hosted blogs -- was just super-excited about the new release. Well, the wait is over and the official release for WordPress 2.7 is now available from WordPress.org.

WordPress 2.7, named "Coltrane" in honor of the Jazz legend, is a pretty significant step forward in WordPress's history. As Brad noted in his first look at the 2.7 beta, most of these changes are on the backend, but they are designed to greatly enhance your productivity and speed in maintaining your blog. On the front-end side, threaded comment support and support for "sticky" posts make it easier for readers to communicate with one another and access important information.

You can check out the WordPress Codex for 2.7 to see some of the technical details behind the new changes. I had a chance to talk to Mark Jaquith, one of the lead developers for WordPress .org, about the new release and some of his favorite features.

WordPress 2.7 was officially released last night after several months in development. The new version of the popular blogging client features a ton of behind the scenes changes, allowing bloggers to more easily install plugins and customize the look and feel of the blogging interface.

One of the most useful improvements was the decision to move most of the site navigation features to a sidebar where you can expand or collapse the sections you need rather than clicking a link and waiting for the page to reload as you did with earlier version of WordPress. But the problem with the sidebar navigation is that it takes up more screen real estate, giving you less room for writing or managing your blog posts.

Enter Ozh' Admin Drop Down Menu. Long before the WordPress team realized the value of drop down menus, this plugin offered bloggers the ability to convert the site navigation links into drop down menus which cut back on the number of page loads you need to wait through to get from the main page to the plugin page, post page, or other pages.

I had been a bit concerned that the developer would stop updating the plugin now that WordPress includes a collapsible menu. But just a few hours after WordPress 2.7 was released, Ozh" Admin Drop Down Menu 3.0 was released with support for the latest version of WordPress. It removes all the navigation links that show up on the left side of the WordPress 2.7 dashboard and replaces them with drop down menus near the top of your screen. The net effect is that you regain a ton of screen real estate.

We'll have a more in-depth look at WordPress 2.7 later today.