I am a big fan of taking out clutter, focusing on what really matters and love to simplify both life and working environment. The WordPress dashboard is well thought out, and popular, but I am the first one to launch an external writing application such as OmmWriter or WriteRoom, helping me focus just on content, especially when writing longer entries. For many smaller projects I am involved in, I prefer ’simpler’ platforms than WordPress, platforms focusing more on blogging rather than on being the awesomest, most complete or extendable platform.

Enter Zen, a distraction free writing environment for WordPress by Mohammad Jangda.

If you’re a fan of ‘anti-clutter’ plugins such as simple email notifications, you’ll love Zen for WordPress. More even, if you would have been on the verge of switching to a more writing focused platform such as Habari but on could not decide to ditch WP yet, Zen might be what you are looking for.

If you’re a fan of WriteRoom, OmmWriter, or similar tools that help you focus on your words instead of the tools you’re using, this plugin will soon make your wildest dreams come true (and give you a simple clean environment within WordPress to write to your heart’s content)! While Zen does not replace the existing Edit Post/Page screen, it provides a layer on top that will help you focus more on the quality of your words and less on the distracting fine-tuning of minuscule details.

Zen does not replace your editor or change the look of your dashboard but in the post editor you now can activate Zen with one click and call up the new layer. You can even set ‘Always write in Zen mode’ as standard (in Your Profile).

Zen comes with several themes (which can be selected in Your Profile) making Zen a little more noisy again but you don’t have to use these.

All in all Zen’s a nice and agreeable addition to WordPress and a new recommended plugin for me. Download Zen from the plugins directory or install it within WordPress (search the plugins repo for Zen).

After Automattic showered Blackberry and Android lovers with some WP love, it looks as if iPhone fans may receive not only push notifications, but WordPress stats within the iPhone app as well.

(WordPress For iPhone) One of the most requested features for the WordPress iPhone app has been to include site statistics such as pageviews per post, referrals, and the like inside the app. In fact, according to this trac ticket from 17 months ago, it’s been something we’ve wanted to do for a very long time. [...]

What I’d love to know is what would people like to see both data wise, and visually, from inside the WordPress for iPhone app – and if something like push notification for stats would be of interest ? [sic]

Having push notifications for stats would be awesome, enabling bloggers to respond to traffic spikes resulting from a breaking news article, a controversial post or (God forbid) a DDoS attack.

(Note: iPhone users can currently analyze their traffic via Statistics For WordPress, which although lacking push notifications does provide an awesome user interface)

There is still no news on whether WordPress will launch push notifications for comments (a feature millions of bloggers will love), but the fact that they are considering push notifications at all is a good sign.

WordPress is also adding VideoPress to the iPhone app, which they briefly mentioned after highlighting their upcoming Nokia app last week.

(Official WordPress Blog) VideoPress is now supported in the WordPress for BlackBerry app, and is coming soon for iPhone and Android.

Note: Emphasis mine.

There is no word on when these new releases will hit the app store (which unfortunately can take weeks to get through Steve Job’s “app tribunal”), but these updates should help the iPhone app as powerful as its Blackberry and Android brethren.

After releasing official apps for Blackberry and Android phones (not to mention updating their iPhone app), it looks like WordPress will be releasing an official Nokia app in the not so distant future.

(Official WordPress Blog) We are very excited to share with all of you that in the coming weeks we’ll be opening up a beta test for the official Open Source WordPress for Nokia app. For developers who are interested in getting involved, we just opened-up a dev blogwith details, links to the source code and trac tickets, and an early alpha build. We’ll be leveraging the Qt framework which means will be able to support both the S60 and Maemo platforms.

WordPress has already created an official blog for Nokia, although right now it is currently protected.

While I am surprised WordPress is supporting S60 (as even Nokia gave up on Symbian), I am glad that they are showing some affection towards Maemo which could rival Blackberry, Android and iPhone devices (provided they come out with some decent hardware to match the mobile OS).

Missing from WordPress’s “smartphone celebration” was Palm Pre, which despite receiving glowing reviews has yet to attract the big WP’s attention.

Although there is an unofficial WordPress app coming to Pre lovers courtesy of Keen Studious (hat tip: Pre Central), there is no word on when Keen’s premium app will appear live on the webOS market.

Hopefully WordPress will give the Palm Pre a second (or perhaps even a third) look, as having an app upon every major smartphone could help WordPress achieve blog domination (at least when it comes to mobile devices).

Right on the heels of the launch of their Blackberry and Android brethren, it looks like iLovers have finally received several updates to the WordPress app–all of them dealing with comment moderation.

(WordPress for iPhone) I’m very excited about this new version which is focused on improved comment moderation including:

• Reply to Comments
• Edit Comments
• Highlighting the new items in the comment list

We hope this release will make the comment experience on the go much more enjoyable and useful.

These latest features should make it easier for bloggers to not only weed out the trolls, flamers and spammers who make a living harassing others, but also help them engage with their vocal audience (which is a good idea if you want to maintain a loyal following).

The ability to edit comments is useful as well, as it will help users modify comments that are NSFW (or Not Safe For Work for you non-geeks out there) or for users who (foolishly) post personal phone numbers in the comment section.

Despite the update, the WordPress iPhone app is still rather lacking when compared against the Blackberry and Android apps (hint: where’s my VideoPress?!) so it looks like I will still have to rely upon BlogPress and Statistics for Wordpress to satisfy my blogging needs.

Update: It looks like WordPress also allows you to create hyper links easily within a post (a feature they had during WordPress 1.0).

Right after WordPress launched their Android app, the WP crew finished the final touches on their Blackberry app that rivals the one they built upon Google’s mobile OS.

Somewhere in the dark my iPhone cries out in jealousy.

(Blackberry for WordPress) So what’s new in version 1.0:

• Ability to record and upload videos from your phone. We now support both 3gp and 3g2 formats on older generation BlackBerry devices.
• Introducing support for the HD video service VideoPress.
• Streamlined UI and functionality relating to comment moderation
• Overall enhancements to the speed and stability of the app

WordPress’s inclusion of VideoPress within the app may signal that the company is taking mobile video blogging seriously, and may help it to distinguish itself when compared against its rivals (like Squarespace, Typepad and Joomla).

Whether or not this translates into video support for iPhone fans is yet to be seen, although for now it’s good to see those loyal to the Blackberry brand finally have a decent blogging app (although I will admit that I am now jealous of my Blackberry buds).

Blackberry fans can download the app from the Blackberry App World, which (like its mobile siblings) is priced at the premium price of free. ;-)

(Hat tip: Mashable)

After stumbling upon signs that WordPress was creating an Android app earlier this year, Mashable broke the news that the app has officially entered Google’s playground, thanks in part to Dan (from wpToGo).

While the WordPress team has created a video highlighting many impressive features (note: reply to comments within the app?! Dude!), what’s really interesting is WordPress’s plans to add video support and native stats within the app itself.

(Dan Roundhill) It’s been a busy few months for me. wpToGo has grown up and become the official WordPress client for Android! I added a lot of new features to it including creating and managing pages, replying to comments and a lot more! I’m also very excited to open up the app to the developer community to make the app super awesome! Video upload? Stats viewing? UI Sexiness? All should be coming

(Note: Emphasis Mine)

By baking in video uploading and stats within the Android app, WordPress may have just created the most powerful mobile blogging app ever–at least across the 3 of the hottest platforms (Apple, Android and Blackberry smart phones).

In order for iPhone lovers (like me) to duplicate the same functionality upon our iDevices, we not only have to download the official WordPress app, but two other third party apps as well (BlogPress and Statistics for WordPress).

Although there is still no word whether WordPress will release video support for their iPhone app, their entrance upon Android should help make the mobile Google OS a little more relevant and may help convince rivals (like Squarespace) to throw their hat into the Android ring as well.

Up First The category-slug.php Template

Before it was added, all you had available was the standard category.php template file which we’re all aware of, along with category-id.php which would have been used by some developers if they needed to show different layouts for each category archive. The trouble starts though if you’ve got 2 or 3 files like category-2.php, category-30.php and category-17.php then it get’s a little confusing if you forget what ID goes with which category!

So with the addition of category-slug.php you can now have category-blog.php, category-announcement.php among many others. If you use the Top Level Categories plugin to build your site, that’s when it removes /category/ from the URL, and makes the archives look more like a page, you can truely IMHO take advantage of these template options.

Next We’ve Got The tag-id.php Template

After category-slug.php was introduced, another ticket was opened up asking if the tag templates could be brought up in-line with the category templates, which required adding the tag-id.php and the WordPress Development Team agreed to so just that.

Finally The page-slug.php And page-id.php Templates

I’m not sure about you, but I much prefer the idea of using page-sitemap.php to show my /sitemap/ page, over the custom page template in which you have to select from the template section within the post area of the admin area.

The same goes for page-4.php too, but like category-id.php and tag-id.php, if your site has a lot of page templates it can get a little messy inside the theme folder not knowing what file you might want to edit. Which is why I’d go for the page-slug.php option.

Just remember that whatever you use for the permalink, or URL, of your category/tag/page that you use it for these templates otherwise it’ll not work and they’ll default back to their respective category.php, tag.php and page.php templates!

What Are We Still Looking For?

If you take a look at the Template Hierarchy over on the WordPress Codex, you should see my point, as it’s about the only thing missing. And if you’ve not quite worked out what they are, then look no further than author-id.php and author-slug.php templates, am I right or not? :) Maybe it might just make it’s way into 3.0 you never know.

So there you have it, a little summary of a couple of new features that made 2.9, roll on 3.0!

Issues with scheduled posts should be resolved and the same applies to feed parsing errors in the admin dashboard. Update your blogs now via the build-in updater or download the latest WordPress update now.

Android lovers rejoice! It looks as if WordPress is finally launching an app for Google’s Android OS, after creating apps for both the iPhone and Blackberry (the latter which has video support! iJealous!).

WordPress has created a special blog at the subdomain Android.wordpress.org (note: they have done something similar with the iPhone and Blackberry), which may hint at a future app coming upon Google’s mobile platform.

While the company has yet to unveil what features the new Android app will contain feature wise, I assume its release is being timed with Google’s launch of Nexus One (which is rumored to be launching on January 5th).

Whether it will be worthy to compare against its iRival and Blackberry buddy, only time tell. However, its entrance upon the Android OS may help inspire Six Apart and *cough* Blogger *cough* to finally enter the world of green robots. :-)

The long awaited version 2.9 of WordPress, codenamed “Carmen”, is now out! Eeek!

Yes, ladies and gents, the development team worked their butts off as quickly as they can to have Carmen available before Christmas. And boy, did they surprise us!

For those of you who don’t know what Carmen has to offer, here’s a list of some of her features!

1. Global undo/”trash” feature, which means that if you accidentally delete a post or comment you can bring it back from the grave (i.e., the Trash). This also eliminates those annoying “are you sure” messages we used to have on every delete.
2. Built-in image editor allows you to crop, edit, rotate, flip, and scale your images to show them who’s boss. This is the first wave of our many planned media-handling improvements.
3. Batch plugin update and compatibility checking, which means you can update 10 plugins at once, versus having to do multiple clicks for each one, and we’re using the new compatibility data from the plugins directory to give you a better idea of whether your plugins are compatible with new releases of WordPress. This should take the fear and hassle out of upgrading.
4. Easier video embeds that allow you to just paste a URL on its own line and have it magically turn it into the proper embed code, with Oembed support for YouTube, Daily Motion, Blip.tv, Flickr, Hulu, Viddler, Qik, Revision3, Scribd, Google Video, Photobucket, PollDaddy, and WordPress.tv (and more in the next release).

These are just from a user standpoint, there are lots of changes on the development side as well. I suggest heading over to this page to see the full list of features.

So what are you waiting for? Don’t let Carmen just stand there in the cold! Let her in! You can download the latest version manually by going here. Or by going to your blog’s dashboard and clicking on Tools > Upgrade.

Now that’s over, the only thing to wait for is Christmas! Happy holidays!