To help new developers with their plugin icons, Matthias Kretschmann has created a handy template for WordPress admin icons with tons of tips. Now, no more excuses, get some good looking icons into your next plugin update.

WP-Snippets has finally received a major upgrade, making it even easier for you to find the code you’re looking for. The various snippets have now been broken up into categories, and more words can be filtered to narrow down the choices to just the snippet you need. If you find one that you’re particularly fond of, you can now favorite a snippet to leave it on the front page when you come back to the site. Speaking of the site, it now has a fully responsive design, so it looks great on your mobile phone when gathering snippets on the go.

If you’re a fan of WordPress and have a few snippets to share on WP-Snippets, there is also a new contribute page to satisfy your urge to share your knowledge.

There are tons of snippets available at WP-Snippets, so dive in and see what you can find, or help out by adding tons of your own.

As described on the VaultPress blog, “The vulnerability allows third parties to upload and execute arbitrary PHP code in the TimThumb cache directory. Once the PHP code has been uploaded and executed, your site can be compromised however the attacker likes.”

The folks at Sucuri have constructed a great list of just a few affected WordPress themes, just to give you idea of how many themes use TimThumb.

If your theme uses TimThumb, contact your theme author for an update immediately, or download the latest version if it has already been updated. If your theme author is not willing to offer an update, it’s probably time for a new theme, but you can also get the latest version of TimThumb from its Google Code page.

• A new Quick Photo feature, soon to be the favorite of mobile photo bloggers everywhere, allows you to go from camera to post in one easy step.
• WordPress.com and Jetpack stats have finally be added to the app.
• The app has now been fully translated into ten languages.
• Over 75% of reported crashes have been fixed.

If you have struggled with the iOS app lately, it’s definitely time to update. What do you think of the new release?

• WordPress for Android – Of course, you have to start off the list with this app, the official WordPress app from Automattic. “WordPress for Android is an Open Source app that empowers you to write new posts, edit content, and manage comments with built-in notifications.” Requires a self-hosted WordPress or a WordPress.com blog. (Android Market)
• PostBot – “PostBot is an open-source WordPress client and supports multiple images in a post with thumbnail previews, sharing of images directly from Camera and Picture apps, editing existing posts, saving drafts locally, adding categories to a blog, and multiple blogs.” Requires a self-hosted WordPress or a WordPress.com blog. (Android Market)
• WP Stats – “Wp Stats is an app for your Android device that helps you to access your WordPress traffic stats collected by the WordPress.com Stats plugin. It is much faster way of reading all important data about your traffic blog than opening it in a web browser.” Requires the WordPress.com Stats plugin or a WordPress.com blog. (Android Market)

As you can see, this list is rather short. I’ve been hunting for WordPress-related Android apps for the last four days, and besides some incredibly low-rated copies of WordPress for Android, this is it.

In other words, we need your help! Do you use an Android app with WordPress that we’ve neglected to list? If so, we’d love to hear about it!

• WordPress for iOS – Of course, you have to start off the list with this app, the official WordPress app from Automattic. “With WordPress for iOS, you can moderate comments, create or edit posts and pages, and add images or videos with ease.” Requires a self-hosted WordPress or WordPress.com blog. (iTunes)
• Express for WordPress – “Express is an iPhone app built to quickly and effortlessly publish images/links/notes and short posts, on the go, to your WooThemes powered WordPress website.” Requires either a tumblog theme from WooThemes or the WooTumblog plugin. (iTunes)
• PhotoSmash – “PhotoSmash makes sharing images on your WordPress blog a snap! Don’t wait until you get back home to post your images.” Requires the PhotoSmash Galleries plugin. (iTunes)
• Polldaddy – “Take the pulse of your customers directly for the first time ever with Polldaddy for iOS. Now all the power and flexibility of Polldaddy surveys are literally at your fingertips.” Requires a Polldaddy account and the Polldaddy Polls and Ratings plugin for WordPress interoperability. (iTunes)
• ShoZu – “ShoZu connects you with all your favorite social networks from one app. Update all of your social networks at once – upload photos and videos to over 50 of your favorite sites including Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, Photobucket, WordPress, MySpace, Photoshop, and email addresses at the same time.” Requires a ShoZu account. (iTunes)
• WordPress Mobile Statistics – “WP Mobile statistics gives you the opportunity to check the information available from the WordPress.com Stats plugin from your iPhone/iPad or iPod Touch.” Requires the WordPress.com Stats plugin or a WordPress.com blog. (iTunes)
• WP Dump – “WP-Dump is a simple and fast photo app for WordPress blog users to upload photos directly into their blog.” Requires the i-Dump iPhone Photo Uploader plugin. (iTunes)

Do you use an iOS app with WordPress that we’ve neglected to list? If so, we’d love to hear about it!

This version cures numerous bugs and has been tested especially carefully in two areas: Media Uploader and Post Write/Edit.

The team is already hard at work on 2.6.5, so don’t be a stranger to the support forums if you find any problems.

Do you use the WordPress for iOS mobile app? Do you think this release was an improvement over the last?

When you click on a tag, a drop down appears showing information related to the tag as well as a short description. The guide itself does not contain any information that you couldn’t find by browsing the Codex but simply presents an organized look at the various Template tags WordPress has to offer. There are a number of other resources that perform a similar function. The two that I know of are WPSeek and SeekWP although SeekWP appears to be suspended.

Currently the app’s listing mentions that it only supports the N97 Mini and X6, but the development team is working on getting the app approved for “Symbian3 devices such as N8, C6, C7 and more.”

The Nokia app joins the ranks of the other popular WordPress mobile apps for Android, Blackberry, and iOS.

Do you use an N97 Mini and X6, and will you be installing the new mobile app?

The new design was a team effort, though some credit should definitely go to Nick Momrik for handling the new chart and a good majority of the extra work, Joen Asmussen for the overall design, and Matt Thomas for keeping everyone on track.

Currently, the new stats interface is only for WordPress.com users, but the WordPress.com Stats Plugin for self-installed WordPress blogs will be updated once they have all the kinks worked out.

Unfortunately, my WordPress.com blog is private, so I really don’t have enough stats to truly test the new interface. What do you think of the new WordPress.com Stats interface?

• Video: “record video within the app and then upload it directly to a blog.”
• Local Drafts: “save posts locally before they’re published or saved online.”
• Autosaves: “If something happens and you need to revert to an older version of a post, you can just select a previous version and restore it without issue.”
• Setup Process: “allowing WordPress.com users a quick way to add their blogs, and giving WordPress.org users a faster, more streamlined experience when adding their sites.”
• Media Library: “a new Media Library more along the lines of what you’re used to with WordPress.”

This release would not have been possible without your feedback and beta testing skills, so keep doing whatever you can to make each release better than the last!

Despite all the bug fixes, I had to re-enter the password for every blog that I manage with the app. It was a minor inconvenience, but it still beats using the admin panel in Mobile Safari.

Do you use the WordPress for iOS mobile app? What do you think of the new features?

You know what that means – more users are visiting your WordPress site using IE9 everyday.

So why not take advantage of a feature that combines new capabilities in IE9 and the Windows 7 Taskbar to ask visitors to place a permanent link to your site on their Windows 7 Taskbar?

Some real quick background.  On the Windows 7 Taskbar any icon that is placed there can be programmed by the software’s author to have interactive menu items on what is called a Jumplist.  This Jumplist typically contains shortcuts to program features and commands to provide quick access to them.

Well with the introduction of IE9 webpages can have code added to them that will allow a visitor to drag the favicon to their taskbar and that code then adds an interactive Jumplist to the favicon as it sits on the users Windows 7 Taskbar to create those interactive features.

Well for those of us who use WordPress as our publishing platform we know that the easiest way to add features and functionality to our websites is through the use of plugins and the breadth of developers that are out there making them.

Well you know it was only a matter of time before the plugins started to be built to take advantage of these new features in IE9 and Windows 7.

Let me introduce you to the IE9 Pinned Site plugin by fatihboy.  This plugin is very fresh as it was published just yesterday for its initial release and it is his first WordPress plugin.

So installation is straight forward like most plugins – just download it from the WordPress.org Plugin site and then activate it on your site.

You will find the simple one page settings page for this plugin under the Settings > IE9 Pinned Site menu item.

Here you just select whether to feature your posts, categories or tags on the Jumplist for your website and how many entries you want of each.  Using those settings above this is what the Jumplist looks like for my site WindowsObserver.com:

As you can see my most recent 5 posts are at the top followed by the Tasks header which provides links to 5 of my website pages.

An additional feature of Jumplists in Windows 7 on the taskbar is the ability to pin things to them. 

This is the same Jumplist except I have pinned one post which you see under the Pinned header.  Just click the pin icon while hovering over a Jumplist entry to pin that item to the Jumplist on your system.  The ability to pin a site on the Jumplist is in Windows 7 and its new Taskbar not in the plugin itself.

I see a lot of potential for this plugin for customization of the Jumplist such as the name of each header area, picking what entries you want on it as far as posts, tags and categories are concerned instead of just by a numerical number and allowing you to place something from each group on the Jumplist (i.e. categories, tags and posts all being represented instead of just one).

Don’t get me wrong this is a great initial implementation of this capability and I am pleased once again that the strong community of developers has answered the need for this so quickly after the new features are available in a new browser.

What do you think?  Any suggestions for the author of the plugin for future updates?  Looking forward to hearing from you in the comments.

Let’s pretend that you needed a way to identify logged in users.  You could hunt through the Codex for this function, or go to WordPress Snippets and quickly find this straight forward snippet.

The incredibly simple WordPress Snippets is currently packed with forty-six useful code snippets, it appears to be growing steadily, and feedback and suggests are welcome.

WordPress.com users can now pin their blog to their Windows taskbar, allowing them to immediately launch the blog from the taskbar and write a post, moderate comments, and view stats from a contextual menu. Self-installed WordPress users can also join the pin party with the new Internet Explorer Site Pinning plugin. The plugin is only two days old, so it’s not as fully featured as WordPress.com’s implementation, but more features are on the way.

The one Windows PC that I do own will forever remain on Windows XP, so I won’t be able to take part in the IE9 festivities, but I’d love to hear your take on IE9. Should we shudder and be fearful, or should we cheer and be joyful?

To enable Email Post Changes, go to Settings/Email Post Changes in your admin panel. You’ll be able to choose which registered authors receive notifications and add additional email addresses.

If you have a self-hosted WordPress blog with multiple authors, you can install the official Email Post Changes plugin to enjoy the same great features. You may also be interested in Audit Trail (“keep track of what is going on inside your blog”), Capability Manager (“to manage WordPress roles and capabilities”), Highlight Author Comments (to “display comments made by a post’s author in a distinctive style with no need to edit your template files”), Impostercide (to “prevent unauthenticated users from ‘signing’ a comment with a registered user’s email address, name or URL”), and WP Word Count (to “give you word count statistics for your blog’s posts and pages . . . as well as breakdowns for each of your blog’s authors”).

Do you run a blog with multiple authors? Which plugins do you use? Are you planning to use Email Post Changes?