wptouch: wordpress iphonified is a complimentary theme installed as a plugin on your WordPress blog or website that will format your content with this Apple-inspired, full-featured theme when your visitors are using an iPhone or iPod touch.

Although from a quick glance everything appears to be operating normally, just an FYI that I just upgraded the blog to the new version of Wordpress (2.5).

I’ve stumbled on several variations on a lifestreaming plugin for Wordpress (lifestreaming is basically displaying your activity on twitter, flickr, and other services in a nice linear calendar of some sort). This probably all started with Jeremy Keith’s php source code a couple of years ago.

Chris Davis’s Lifestream
Lifestream For Wordpress (Looks nice)
SimpleLife For Wordpress (Updated, but appears to be PHP5 only although using SimplePie)

If anyone stumbles on lifestreaming solutions for Wordpress, drop a comment.

WP’s Matt talks about bogus SecurityFocus SQL Injection reports, but even more importantly why and how you need to keep your WordPress updated. If you ever doubted how to upgrade, or what resources you might need in order to keep this simple and straightforward, read this now.

I recently started with Twitter (I know, boy that took a while) and I have to say this is definitely the place for those on the cutting edge of web development and online marketing. Some great conversations out there. If you are someone who’s interests lie in web development, social networking and media, wordpress, or anything else you see on this blog (if you are reading this blog, then you are probably already a good match) then feel free to follow me on Twitter. I’ll probably follow you back.

http://twitter.com/dimensionmedia

I also installed a twitter plugin to display my last twitters in the sidebar on the right above ‘tidbits’.

I blogged about the WPhone plugin before, but the Wordpress MU Plugin has been modified the plugin for WordpressMU user. Actually, i’m linking to someone linking to the direct download because I don’t see any mention of this on the actual author’s blog.

I’ve been looking for this. The Page Excerpt plugin allows you to specify a specifc excerpt for WordPress pages (like pages). Now upgraded to Wordpress 2.5 (one of the first plugins that i’ve seen advertise this, with more sure to follow).

Here are some noted changes in database structure from Wordpress 2.3 to 2.5. Nothing big, but if you design plugins and such you need to bookmark this. I would imagine at this stage it’s final.

Jeremiah Owyang, probably one of my favorite new guys on social media, talks about the new feature “My Starbucks Ideas” where customers can submit, discuss, and vote on ideas (that’s not the best description, but it’s something you’ll get once you see it). If you have interest in Web 2.0 or Social Networking trends, this is a good quick read. This functionality screams for someone to make it into a WordPress plugin.

WordPress 2.5 sneak peek from the official development blog. The “A customizable dashboard, multi-file upload, built-in galleries, one-click plugin upgrades, tag management, built-in Gravatars, full text feeds, and faster load times” statement sums up the new features. The new look is growing on me, although i still think the visual improvements aren’t THAT much of an improvement. Have to wait and see I guess. But it looks like it will be out any day now.

PHP Speedy Wordpress Plugin - It’s finally here. I have yet to try it, should be interesting to see the responses. You are at least knee-deep in Wordpress development, you should check it out.

This of the 10 Best Twitter Tools for Wordpress Blogs I recently bookmarked due to my recent signup to twitter. Many of these plugins’ descriptions are similar, but nice to have a solid variety.

LogoBlog Wordpress Theme

This custom page slug plugin allows you to create a custom page slug then fill that page with any content (html, php, whatever) with “full access to the Wordpress and Plugin architecture”. This is nice for niche requests, although it’s minor coding without the plugin. Congrats to Leon.

Screenshots from the latest Wordpress 2.5 build. Like the dashboard, but stacking all those the options on the write page is horrible. Why scroll for that?

Looks like the WordPress team have setup aWordPress Development Updates blog to report on work for WordPress 2.5 - and they are using the Prologue-theme which I believe is the first I’ve seen in action “out in the field”. Very exciting to see this working and makes me more determined to find a practical application for myself. [ via ]

This Facebook Wordpress theme is ok, and available in multiple colors, but how long before this becomes too common? But nice effort!

Trying to get rid of the “A new version of WordPress is available! Please update now” messages for anyone but the admin? This handy Notify Admin Only of Wordpress Updates plugin will fix that. Not that this should be done often - but sometimes the message can get annoying and you don’t want to worry anyone but the admins of clients’ websites. You can also easily edit the plugin to remove the message entirely if you want.

Will I ever need to know this?. Probably not, but it’s still cool.

Once you start doing custom plugins and modifications for Wordpress, you begin to pay closer attention to the update details such as thiswhat has changed in WordPress 2.3.3 notice. Doesn’t look like any changes effect what I do. If you don’t want to upgrade because of fears of it breaking your custom Wordpress site, just update XMLRPC.PHP for the security part of the update.

As a Wordpress user, I use Akismet of course, but what if you had to design one from scratch? Or at least wanted to know how to put one together? Jonathan Snook tells how he built an effective blog comment spam blocker. Results will vary of course, but I found it interesting how he identified and treated his spam.

Lorelle has another great article on Content Theft and WordPress. Content theft is becoming a bigger issue (i’ve got at least a dozen automatic blogs repeating my posts). Although Lorelle’s primary goal is to ensure the difference between Wordpress.com hosted blogs and blogs powered by Wordpress, there are some helpful tips on reporting copyright violations near the bottom of her post.

I’m bookmarking this sample Facebook application with CodeIgniter mainly for the CodeIgniter aspect since i’m not really an active Facebook user. Still interesting, and worth a look.

Although it looks like there are plugins that accomplish this, it’s nice to know how to highlight author or admin comments in a Wordpress blog using the oldschool approach of php and css.

No matter if you use twitter or not, the Prologue theme from some of the minds Automattic is kinda like “group twittering” in a blog form. Unique and interesting, something which is rare to say these days for a Wordpress theme. Source code seems to be available, but no time to look at the moment.

Somebody at Foliovision (no author on this page - why? is it a secret?) wrote a good comparsion of two Wordpress plugins that handle FAQ features - FAQ-Tastic and Ask Me. Good read if your client is requesting such a feature for their Wordpress site.

These tutorials on various Wordpress actions are basic, they might be useful if you ever wanted to show a client how to work a Wordpress blog or site.

I’ve been hunting for an ecommerce plugin for Wordpress at the request of a client, and so far it appears that the WP e-Commerce plugin by Instinct Entertainment is the only horse in town. I’m bookmarking to give it a good test later. There appears to be a “free” and “commercial” version. I listed the “recently added features” (as of WP e-Commerce 3.5.1) below. The paid version is WP e-Commerce Gold which is a reasonably priced $15 for “a single Blogger”. However, i’m not sure what the $250 “Gold Upgrade - For Business” is exactly for outside of “Businesses setting up WP e-Commerce sites for their clients”. For $250, it better be an unlimited (or close to it) license.

Recently added Features

* New - Search Engine Friendly URLs / Permalinks (latest RC)
* New - Marketing options under shop options (latest RC)
* New - Members Only Module
* Customizable pagination for product listing
* Unlimited products & categories
* AJAX powered Sliding Shoping Cart
* Shop front highlighting for newly added products
* AJAX powered Web 2.0 DropShop - additional gold module
* Grid View - additional gold module
* Fancy AJAX Alerts on Add to Cart
* Purchase history for logged in users
* New and improved Audio Player Module for selling MP3 files
* Chinese Language file
* Share this / Digg Product social networking promo tools
* Downloadable CSV files
* Detailed Purchase Log & Filters
* Configurable Tax settings including USA & Canada
* PayPal IPN
* URL linking to products and images
* – Next version
* RSS product feed widget
* Google Cart

I got to start reading manuals when I buy electronics… Rupert discovers the iPod touch’s Pop-up Anywhere Play Music Menu - basically a popup menu to control music no matter where you are on your iTouch (does it work with the iPhone I wonder?). It’s easy as pie - just hit the home button twice. It will even work on your “locked” screen. Amazing.

Some things just aren’t obvious to me I guess, but thanks to Rupert Glee’s note of how to have fine control over the volume in an iTouch i’m happier. My fat fingers and the touch screen aren’t always a great combo.

I might need this for a client, so i’m bookmarking this Import Users Plugin.

This plugin was created for people who need to easily add multiple users to their WordPress installation. Simply give it a list of usernames and email addresses, specify the role of the users (subscriber, author, admin, etc.) and it does the rest.

Three good tips to protect your WordPress installation. Basically boils down to putting an .htacess file in your wp-admin directory and a blank index.html file in your plugins directory. Also some possible additional tips and alternate methods in the comments.

Kudos to Joost for his Users to CSV WordPress plugin. I imagine you could modify this for other data-to-CSV uses for custom Wordpress sites, which applies to my clients.

I can’t link to every Wordpress plugin out there, but I do use and recommend WP-Print for adding the functionality of allowing printable posts to your Wordpress blog. Nice options area in the admin area for some minor controls without html or css editing.

One of those “cool tools that i’ll rarely use”: Chirag Mehta built an app “where you can create a color on the screen (or copy-paste CSS hex# color) and find out the name of the closest matching color.” [ via Andy Skelton ]