I’ve been using WordPress for quite some time for my personal site and sites that I develop for my clients. I won’t get into the merits/virtues now, suffice it to say I find it extremely flexible and extensible. In my new job – more on this in a future post – I am lucky to work for a firm that feels similarly and we have used the platform to create a number of really great sites that extend well beyond what you may expect WordPress to be capable of. When combined we have 20+ years of experience with the platform and we have literally seen it all – at least so we thought – until last night.

As one of my many responsibilities I train and support our clients and make myself available around the clock to make sure that they are able to do what they need, when they need to do it. As onerous as it sounds, it’s actually a fun and fulfilling aspect of my job and helps me maintain a very customer-focused perspective. Last night I was watching Game 1 of the NLCS (go Phils) when I received two rather panicked email messages from one of our clients who is in the final stages of prepping her site for launch. She basically alluded to the fact that she was adding/editing some posts when she received a menacing message on her screen.

Danger!
Self-comparison detected.
Initiating infinite loop eschewal protocol.
Self destruct in… 3
2
1

Even for someone who has designed, developed and used the platform I had never heard of the problem prior to this. Not knowing exactly what was going on and suspecting the worst – a hack or some other type of breach – I was concerned. However, I was also a bit curious so I decided to try and replicate it myself on my own blog. All that I had to do was to create a post, allow a revision to be saved and then try to compare the older version against itself. Here were my results:

Now, I knew my own install was pretty secure – I keep up with patches and maintenance on a regular basis – and also host my sites on a different server from the affected client so I pretty quickly ruled out hacking. But I still wasn’t sure if it was a problem or something else. I turned to Google for some help. Turns-out that there is a documented, but very unknown “Easter Egg” for WordPress that has been present since version 2.6 (at least per Doncha – a source I really trust when it comes to WordPress).

Here’s what I learned because of this whole situation. First, even if you think you’ve seen it all you probably haven’t. Second, never underestimate the cleverness of a bunch of programmers with a little extra time on their hands. Finally, always, always, always (did I say always?) keep your WordPress installations updated. While it’s not a 100% full-proof way of keeping your site secure, it does go quite a long way toward that goal.

For the purposes of this post we’ll keep things short and simple. Set-up and installation of the app on my BB 8330 (Curve) was quite easy. The application is pretty polished and intuitive and I haven’t experienced any technical issues yet.

There are one or two issues that I have note specific to adding categories to the post (e.g. I couldn’t move into the category field directly rather I had to access it via the BlackBerry menu key. And once I was in to the category selection dialogue it wasn’t really clear how to select the categories that I wanted to assign to the post – I did finally figure it out and you have to use the “Change Option” menu option to toggle the checkbox on or off – which seems a bit kludgy).

Other than those two usability issues, which aren’t really major, I am extremely impressed and am definitely going to continue to experiment with the app.

More to come…

For those of you out there who can’t use an iPhone and all of the goodness associated with it, you know how frustrating it is to find good usable apps for your SmartPhone/Smart Device. While I can’t commit with 100% certainty, I’d probably give up my trusty BlackBerry Curve for a iPhone if Verizon ever offered it, but until that point (I’m not holding my breath) I am pretty happy with what I can do with my BlackBerry and the range of apps that have come available lately for it.

However there is one area that was definitely a sore point for me. I really never found a usable application for connecting to my self-hosted WordPress blog so I could post on the go and manage what I needed to. Sure there were other ways to get content to my blog, but it left a lot to be desired. A month or two ago Matt Mullenweg (founder of Automattic the creators of WordPress) announced at WordCamp San Francisco that his team was committed to creating an application for the Berry users. Of course it was well behind the release of an iPhone app that served the same purpose, but the word was finally official. What wasn’t clear was the timeline and a lot of us were left holding our breath and hoping it would be sooner rather than later.

It appears that it was sooner rather than later after all. Earlier today, the WordPress BlackBerry client launched in a public beta of a new open source BlackBerry WordPress application borne out of a collaborative effort between the folks at Automattic and the folks at Danais, who led the MoPress Open Source project. You can read more about their work on the project on their blog (WordPress for BlackBerry):

Here are some things to consider while taking a tour of this new BlackBerry app:

* The app is for WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress version 2.5.1 or newer
* This app should work with any of the new BlackBerry devices such as the 8700, Pearl, Curve, Bold, and Storm
* BlackBerry OS requirements are OS 4.2.1 or newer

Being a public beta, it’s important to realize the large amount of potential bugs that can occur, before writing this app off as not what you want. If you’re not interested in trying a pre-release version of this software, you should wait until 1.0 is out.

To install the beta application: Point your BlackBerry browser to http://blackberry.wordpress.org/install and follow the instructions.

I’m going to be putting it through its paces for the next few days and will report back on my impressions. Stay tuned for more.