Thanks to the huge success of the iPhone/iPod Touch, Android, and other mobile devices, Apps have become all the rage.  The problem for many webmasters and WordPress users is that most smaller WordPress websites/blogs can’t afford to have a custom app developed for their WordPress site.  

Of course, thanks to beauty of the open source nature of WordPress, WordPress users have access to all sorts of great WordPress plugins.  I recently found myself debating whether or not to develop an app for WordPress Hacks and decided that first I would look into what free WordPress plugins were available.  My goal was simply to find one which would display a WordPress blog to mobile browsers in a mobile friendly format.  

Based upon roughly 2 million downloads plus great reviews, far and away the best plugin I’ve found to accomplish this is one called WP Touch.  For those that haven’t heard of WP Touch, this WordPress plugin automatically transforms your WordPress blog into an iPhone application-style theme, complete with ajax loading articles and effects, and will display this theme when your WordPress blog is viewed from an iPhone/iPod Touch, Android, Palm Pre, Samsung  and BlackBerry Storm/Torch mobile device!

The admin panel allows you to customize many aspects of its appearance and deliver a fast, user-friendly and stylish version of your WordPress website to mobile visitors, all without modifying a single bit of code or making any changes to your standard WordPress theme.  The mobile theme also includes the ability for visitors to switch between WP Touch view and your site’s regular theme if that is what they prefer.

If you are looking for a more feature-rich product, I discovered that users can also purchase a Pro version of WP Touch which includes a slew of new features like more style, color and branding customizations, themes, 10 languages, more advertising options, web-app mode, and even iPad support.

This guest post was written by Jake Zarobsky, a blogger for Today’s iPhone, custom theme developer, and an amateur photographer. If you have webmaster or WordPress knowledge and are interested in writing a post for WordPress Hacks, please contact us.

Ever notice how many features the standard installation of WordPress lacks? YouTube embedding, stats, and even a specialized Twitter widget? Well, if you have a self hosted blog at WordPress.com, these features are all given to you. In fact, many of these features are forced upon you by the sponsoring company, Automattic. Wanna learn how to get all of that “cloud-power” for your WordPress site?

If you are one of the people who would love to have these features at your disposal and already has a WordPress.com account, keep reading. Otherwise, you’re losing out on a great plugin for self-hosted WordPress sites!

Keep reading to find out more

With the recent release of WordPress 2.8 this past week, there has been a number of complications and/or frustrations from the WordPress community, leading to a lot of discussion about how long you should wait to upgrade WordPress when a new branch is released.  Historically the WordPress team has always done a great job of testing their releases, which I think lead to a strong confidence from the WordPress community when it was time to upgrade.   Combine that with the one-click upgrade option that is now built into WordPress and the annoying tag reminding you to upgrade, and you’ve got a huge number of people who upgraded to WordPress 2.8 immediately upon its release.

Unfortunately, with each new WordPress branch comes changes which sometimes break WordPress plugins, create problems with the WordPress theme you are using, and usually includes changes to the code.   If you upgrade before the themes or plugins you rely on have been updated, this can cause problems.   The iThemes team recently touched on this subject with their post, When Should I Upgrade WordPress?  Their post also includes five helpful things that need done BEFORE you do your one-click upgrade:

1. Make a backup of all your site data
2. Upgrade of all your plugins
3. Visit plugin and theme author websites
4. Disable all plugins
5. Ask yourself if you need to upgrade now

I also recommend waiting a week or so to view feedback before upgrading.

I know several of you haven’t upgraded WordPress to 2.8 yet.   How long do you plan on waiting until you upgrade your WordPress installation?  Please include which version of WordPress you are currently using with your comment!

Twitter has exploded in popularity over the past year as many mainstream media sources have been using the service to communicate with their readers/viewers, but did you know that bloggers can now use Twitter to promote their content as well?

While searching for a WordPress plugin that could automatically publish my blog posts on Twitter, I was thrilled to discover the WordTwit WordPress plugin.    With this plugin, simply upload and activate, then enter the Twitter login information for the account you want the tweets to appear under.   Once done, all your WordPress posts will start to appear on your Twitter account (almost instantly from my experience).

[Download the WordTwit WordPress Plugin]

When setting up a WordPress blog that allows for multiple authors, it seems many people think all that is involved is to setup additional author profiles and/or start accepting guest posts.   Unfortunately, it really isn’t that simple if you want to create a high quality WordPress blog.

Setting up a multi-author WordPress blog may require you to use a number of WordPress plugins to support a variety of functions.   Ideally you’ll also want your theme to be hacked to help maximize the exposure your authors get.   Examples include creating a “Write for Us” page, creating author profile pages, setting your theme to display the author’s profile below their posts, etc.

Multiple Author WordPress Plugins

Here are a couple WordPress plugins that we’ve covered in the past that are ideal for multi-author WordPress blogs:

• Author Exposed – Adds a full featured display of the authors profile.
• Role Manager Plugin – Allows you to control what the various WordPress user roles can and cannot do.

And here are a few other WordPress plugins that you may also have an interest in (we use a few of these here at WordPress Hacks):

• Author Advertising – Plugin that allows you to share Google AdSense income or other advertising between multiple authors.
• Blog Metrics – Collects blog metrics based upon the author of the posts.
• List Authors Widget – Displays a list of authors in your widgets panel linking to the authors.php page.
• Multiple Authors – Allows multiple authors to be listed for an individual WordPress post, automatically keeping track of who has edited the entry.

Multiple Author WordPress Hacks

Here are a few WordPress Hacks we’ve published in the past to help you hack your WordPress theme to be more multi-author friendly:

• How to Add an Author Page to Your Theme
• How to Change the Author Archives Permalink
• How to Single Out Author Comments
• How to Link Author’s Gravatars to Their Posts
• How to Add Bio Information to Your Posts
• How to Point Author Links to the Authors Website
• How to Create a Maximum Size for Your Images
• How to Use Multiple Stylesheets

I’m sure there are also some WordPress plugins or WordPress hacks which aren’t listed above.   Have any multiple author tools or resources you’d like to add to this list?  Let us know in the comments so we can update our post!