Even if iPhone and iPod Touch are very good for displaying web pages, zooming again and again can be a little boring sometimes. Happilly, IWPhone plugin is here to help by allowing you to automatically detect iPhone and iPod user agent and display an optimized theme.

Why optimizing your blog for iPhone

Why should I optimize my theme for the iPhone? My current theme renders very good. This sentence was probably what you thought first when you saw my post title. iPhone uses Safari, so, if your theme looks good on your Mac’s Safari, it will look good through the iPhone.

But there’s a quite boring thing: Having to zoom over and over is a bit boring, especially when text width is wider than iPhone screen. Also, it could be a good idea to use a more minimalistic theme, with no or less Javascript, to enhance browsing speed.

I just purchased an iPod Touch and i use it often to read webpages. A comfortable navigation through my mobile device became a criteria of quality for me. And I’m quite sure that some of your readers thinks the same.

How does it work?

Once you downloaded and unzipped the IWPhone plugin, you’ll see a file named iwphone.php and a iwphone-by-contentrobot directory.
The iwphone.php file is the plugin itself, while the iwphone-by-contentrobot directory is the theme that will be displayed only when the plugin will detect iPhone or iPod Touch user agent.

To install IWPhone, simply upload the iwphone.php file to your wp-content/plugins directory and the iwphone-by-contentrobot directory to your wp-content/themes.
Then, simply activate the IWPhone plugin in your Wordpress admin panel.

That’s all. Now, when someone will visit your blog through an iPhone, the IWPhone theme will automaticly be displayed. If you own an iPhone or an iPod Touch, you should test it now and see how easy to read your blog is.

If you’re interested about customizing the IWPhone theme, you should read what I just posted on my blog.

If you follow the underground world of domain names, you’ve probably noticed that this past week, a lot of coverage has been focusing on hackers who managed to take over a few domains owned by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which is the company who regulates the world’s domain names.     What you may not have heard about, however, is that in what appears to be an unrelated incident, ICANN also had their WordPress blog hacked about the same time.

In another unrelated incident, ICANN’s official blog was attacked using a recent exploit in the blogging software Wordpress. This attack is believed to have been automated and not done with any motivation regarding ICANN itself. The effects were limited to the blog being taken offline for a short while while updates and repairs took place.

ICANN getting their blog hacked was a direct result of failing to upgrade their WordPress installation.  Now obviously ICANN has a fairly high profile blog, but this appeared to be a random attack and can truly happen to anyone.

I’ve actually written in the past a few times about the importance of always upgrading your WordPress installation, but what most of you probably don’t know is that I preach this out of personal experience.  About a year and a half ago my original WordPress blog was hacked simply because I hadn’t upgraded my WordPress installation.  WordPress had released a fix and I didn’t upgrade right away.

I was actually very fortunate that the person who gained access to my site seemed to have good intentions, as he simply warned me to upgrade my WordPress installation.   Unfortunately, though, it is something I will never forget.  Not only do you feel personally violated when this happens, but I was dumb and used similar passwords for many of my other accounts.  Someone with bad intentions could have easily guessed my similar password I used for my email account, then had access to all my accounts and other personal information.

Since that time, I have always upgraded my websites/blogs that use WordPress the day the upgrade is available, and I have always been outspoken to others about upgrading their WordPress installations.  The WordPress team has really been doing a great job of lately of testing their software, so we aren’t usually seeing more than 3-4 upgrades within each WordPress branch (2.3.x, 2.5.x, etc.).   For those new to WordPress, I remember it often going up to 7 or sometimes more in the WordPress 1.5 and WordPress 2.0 days.

In case you weren’t aware, you have a number of options when upgrading your WordPress installation.  Obviously there is the manual upgrade, which many people dread.  Other upgrade options include upgrading via Fantastico, or upgrading using a WordPress plugin such as WordPress Automatic Upgrade.

Would you say that you usually upgrade your WordPress installation right away?

Once again the fourth of July is upon us, and for those of us in the United States, this marks a paid vacation day the day we celebrate our independence and freedom!

Though I plan to take the day off, I did want to offer a quick note I ran across about WordPress.  I wanted to bring to everyone’s attention a post by Planet Ozh about what WordPress plugin authors need to know about WordPress 2.6.  The post covers changes to both the wp-content directory and the wp-config.php files and will likely force many plugin authors to update their plugins for WordPress 2.6. If you are the author of a WordPress plugin, you should probably check this out.

I hope everyone has a happy and safe holiday!

I think it is safe to say that most (if not all) of our readers are big fans of WordPress.  The flexbility of WordPress is just incredible and still manages to impress me at times. What I didn’t realize is that many major corporations are starting to use WordPress to manage their blogs.

A recent post over at BloggingPro caught my attention because they cite a number of examples of WordPress being used by many online corporations, including:

• CNN
• Yahoo
• Sony
• The New York Times
• People
• eBay
• b5Media

That is quite the impressive list in my opinion and I think it goes to show just how easily WordPress can be integrated into all sorts of existing websites.  WordPress.org is definitely the most popular blogging software these days, but I think it is also competing well against CMS software like Joomla, Drupal, etc.

For those of you that have tried other software like Joomla or Drupal, how does WordPress stack up?

This guest post was written by John of WordPress Expert, where he writes about WordPress tips, services, themes, plugins, and more. If you have WordPress knowledge and are interested in writing a post for Hack WordPress, please contact us.

By default, WordPress (2.5 and later) comes with two RSS feed sections on the Dashboard. You can customize these by clicking the “Edit” link and typing in your own RSS feed URL.

But what if you want to add more than 2 feeds to your dashboard?

Just use the free RSS Mix service: enter in the multiple feed URLs that you would like to syndicate in one of your WordPress Dashboard boxes, and then click “Create” to join those feeds into one new feed that you can enter into your Dashboard.

One disadvantage to this tactic is that you have to create a new feed every time you want to edit the list. But still, this could be helpful for WordPress bloggers who would find other sources of information (besides those related to WordPress) more relevant for their blog’s “administration homepage.”