Wordpress has released the module for Apple iPhone . The first Open Source app that lets you write posts, upload photos, and edit your WordPress blog from your iPhone or iPod Touch .
The Apple iPhone WP module works with Wordpress hosted blogs (free blogs), self hosted Wordpress blogs (that is, if you pay for your hosting & maintain your own blog) for all versions of Wordpress 2.5.1 and higher.

Wordpress had just released their new upgraded version, Wordpress 2.6. However, there are a lot of issues with the new release. You can download the new version from the official Wordpress website.
The Wordpress release note says that “2.6 is pretty much identical to 2.5 from a plugin and theme compatibility point of view”. The improvements are mainly on security areas & ways in which you can make blogging easier.
But before you rush & upgrade, you should know the common issues that non-technical users have reported so far.

SMS Text Message is a plugin for WordPress to allow blog owners update their readers via SMS. Although I would not call it an Essential Plugin , the free WordPress Plugin to send SMS adds a nice trendy feature to the blogs.
With so many people depending on their PDAs & phones to socialize on the internet & even to browse, this plugin could help bloggers send out updates or important messages to readers.
The SMS Wordpress plugin is created by Michael Torbert.

As part of the Essential Wordpress Series we would provide Free Wordpress Themes to all bloggers who wish to make money by displaying ads on blogs.
We will release a new free theme, AdVault Theme, suitable for blogs that want to display a good combination of CPC, CPA & CPM ads.
The AdVault Theme is developed from the basic concepts of the popular Pro Ad Theme with many additional features.

Wordpress 2.6 will have new security features. One of them is disabling the default APP and XMLRPC publishing.
According to the Wordpress enhancement note "In order to protect the majority of blogs which don’t use these protocols against any possible security vulnerabilities we should disable them by default."
This is similar to the idea that registration is disabled by default. As an FYI, this feature is already disabled in other blogging softwares like Typepad. But Wordpress will allow publishers to change the Remote Publishing option manually for individual blogs. Blogger, the …

Designing websites & blogs is tricky. And designing your blogs on your own & avoiding the common design mistakes is very difficult if not impossible.
For 2 reasons : One, you have so much information to share, and so little place to put it so that they all appear in front of the reader at once. Two, there are so many softwares, tools & functionalities available to a designer, and most of them free, that you find it hard to choose one & eliminate 2 others.
In this post, I shall share …

From all the professional blogging softwares available, WordPress is still the best. It is best for someone who is starting off new, it is best for someone moving from Google Blogger and it is also the best blogging software for anyone who wants to run their own blog without having to pay.
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Though Six Apart, the company that runs Live Journal & VOX Movable Type have formulated a commercial model to charge for almost the same features, and even though the Moveable Type software is free, running it is not as …

I started blogging with WordPress a few years back. Apart from the simplicity of WordPress, they had a Dashboard when you logged in, and one of the features of that dashboard was "The Latest Post". This column showed the latest post at any point of time.
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I thought that was a fabulous feature. Even if you are a small time blogger, when your post came up as the latest, people had the chance of coming over to your blog. WordPress has changed that feature for some time now. I think they …

CAPTCHA is an intelligent question-response testing method to separate automated responses from human’s ability to notice and answer intelligently. You may have seen CAPTCHA while logging into Yahoo! Chat Rooms! & in many places where you have to prove that you are a human and not a computer program.
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CAPTCHA is an abbreviation of Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart, and CAPTCHA is copyrighted by Carnegie Mellon University. It was first used by Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, Nicholas J. Hopper (all of Carnegie Mellon University) …

Themes are probably the most exciting feature of your blog. In case you are new to Blogging or WordPress, a Theme is the layout of your blog site. They also go by the names of Skin, Styles, Template or Layout. All of them mean the same.
Wordpress community and forums offer a large number of free themes that you could use. The best part is you could modify & tweak most of these themes to suit your own needs.