As WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg confirmed at WordCamp Dallas back in March, Automattic was indeed working on a native iPhone App for WordPress using the SDK. Sure enough, the official WordPress app was announced at the official WordPress for iPhone blog. It didn’t make it into the App Store in time for launch, but about two weeks later, it’s there. Let’s give it a try. Read more…
The WordPress crew has just released the latest and greatest edition of WordPress, version 2.6, today. This release, named ‘Tyner’, brings even more fantastic features to our favorite open-source blogging platform, with some of the bigger features including:
The WordPress team has obviously been working hard to get this release out, and we thank them for all their efforts. You can download the latest version of WordPress from WordPress.org. You can also get the full skinny on version 2.6 from the WordPress Development Blog. Happy blogging!
As we all know, the default WordPress notification e-mails, sent out for things such as comments, trackbacks, and new users, aren’t the cleanest e-mails we’ve ever received. They’re complete with the author’s name, e-mail, website, and even IP address, all listed on their own lines. And when you’re running a popular blog with lots of comments and trackbacks, it can get quite annoying to sift through all the information, especially when reading these messages on a mobile device.
Thankfully, Mike Davidson, author of the handy text replacement tool, sIFR, has created a plugin to clean up these e-mails. The aptly named Clean Notifications plugin cleans up those notification e-mails into a cleaner, to-the-point notification in your inbox.
Before:
After:
Photos courtesy of MikeIndustries.com
The Clean Notifications plugin is a free download from Mike’s site.
THE INTERNET - Popular WordPress community site WPCandy announced their monthly stats report today, the first report after their June 2008 re-launch.
In the month since the site was re-designed, stats almost doubled May’s total page views. However, unique visitors were only slightly higher, meaning visitors were digging deeper into the site than before. This is likely due to the site’s new structure, which introduced four different sections to the site - Articles, Themes, Plugins, and SItes - and greatly improved navigation features.
Top referrers for the monthly period were PositiveSpaceBlog, a design and technology blog, Google Reader, and Stumbleupon. WPCandy also sponsored the first unofficial WordPress day, an event to both celebrate the existence of WordPress and to thank the creators of the popular, free, open-source blogging system. Both the new site introductory post and the WordPress Day post contributed heavily to the site’s impressive stats.
“Our stats have been pretty hawt,” said Michael Castilla, lead admin of WPCandy, during an interview. “It’s great to see that our visitors are enjoying the new site and are using it to its fullest potential.”
By the end of the month, WPCandy exceeded 2,000 feed subscribers, the highest total throughout the site’s history.
Popular articles included the WordPress Help Sheet, a guide to assist WordPress developers, the new site introductory post, the WordPress Day entry, and a collection article listing 10 plugins to improve the blogging system’s administration area.
“We’re quite excited with our stats, but we’re also hoping this is just a glimpse of what’s to come,” explained Dan Philibin, lead developer and author at WPCandy. “We’re hoping to roll out some new features really soon that should expand the site even more.”
WPCandy has quietly promised a theme area to be announced in the future, where users can both download free themes and buy more advanced, “premium” themes. The release date of this new feature has not yet been announced.
Also of note in the stats report was the web browsers used to view the site. Mozilla’s Firefox led the pack with 71% of visitors, followed by Apple Inc.’s Safari web browser. Surprisingly, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer only took 11% of the share, and IE 6 was only used by 2% of the site’s total visitors during the month.
Ptah Dunbar, another author and developer at WPCandy, was not available for comment.
Stats recorded with Mint. This was originally a parody post Dan wrote but Mike forced him to post it. Sorry if you don’t get the humor in this. 
A few weeks ago I got the idea of creating a “starter theme” to work from when I’m beginning to port an HTML template to WordPress. After I’ve finished the mock-ups in XHTML and CSS, it’s always the same process: copy the style.css to the theme folder, chop up the HTML into various PHP files, tweak some stuff, and ship off the theme. During that process I often find myself going back to the default theme for various tags, formats, and templates. Read more…
Here are the winners of this year’s first unofficial WordPress Day contest. We had 20 awesome prizes to give away to participants who either left a comment or made a blog post about why they love WordPress. First, a big shout-out to all of our sponsors who made this contest possible:
Now, here are the winners:
All of the winners will soon be contacted by the sponsor of their prize. We had over 120 comments and blog posts thanking the Automattic team and talking about how you’ve used WordPress. Thanks to everyone for your participation.
-the WPCandy team
As most of you know, today is our self-declared Unofficial International WordPress Day, a day to celebrate the existence of WordPress and to thank Automattic and the rest of the WordPress community for all of their hard work and dedication.
While many of you are posting about why you love WordPress on your blogs, we here at WPCandy are also raising a toast to the WordPress team and community. Here are our thoughts on WordPress. Read more…
Hey everyone - just a reminder that tomorrow is Unofficial International WordPress Day, one day out of the year when we celebrate WordPress and everything that’s been built around it. We’ve also got an awesome contest going on tomorrow with 20 great giveaways that include premium themes, plugins, and more. To make it easier for you to participate, we’ve changed the rules a bit.
Before, we were asking you to post a blog entry about why you love WordPress, thanking Automattic, etc. We decided that was a little much to ask, so we’ve made it super easy for you to win one of our prizes. Simply leave a comment on the official page expressing your love for WordPress, how it’s helped your business, thanking Automattic, etc. and you’ll be entered into the contest. It’s that easy! We’ve got all these awesome prizes, and we want to make sure everyone has an easy and fair chance to enter.
So what are you waiting for? Head on over to the Unofficial International WordPress Day page and leave your comment now!
The second thing is pertaining to Automattic and the entire WordPress community. As you all know, WordPress is free and open-source, and there are many people behind the scenes working their asses off simply because they love WordPress. With that said, we’re asking you to please join us in donating to WordPress. These folks really deserve it. It doesn’t have to be a huge amount - in fact, any amount will do - but not only will it help them out, it’ll also show how much we appreciate all they’ve done.
Thanks!
-The WPCandy Team
