Today, we’ve jubilantly released version 2.3 of WordPress for Android to Google Play. After updating, you’ll see right away that this release includes very exciting updates to the user interface. Let’s dive in to what’s new!

Action Bar

You’ll notice a fresh, new look. We’ve taken into account Android’s “Holo” style guidelines and implemented the Action Bar interface throughout the app. If you’ve used any other apps designed for Android 4.0 or higher, you’ll feel right at home with the new user interface. Your Action Bar provides easy access to common actions such as creating a new post, refreshing, and sharing to other apps.

We also couldn’t resist making the Action Bar in WordPress blue.

Menu Drawer

The older-style dashboard user interface has been replaced with a Menu Drawer for quick and easy navigation to other areas of the app from wherever you are. You’ll find all of the same actions the dashboard had, but with the addition of some nifty new ones.

To access the menu, simply tap the arrow next to the WordPress logo – in the top-left corner of the app — or swipe from the left side of the screen. If you’re on a large tablet device, the menu will always be visible, which takes advantage of the extra screen space. If you have multiple blogs in the app, you’ll see a drop-down list at the top of your Menu Drawer that you can access to quickly switch to another blog to work with, right in the app.

When you leave the app, it will remember the last selection you made in the Menu Drawer so when you return, you can pick up where you left off.

Other new features

In addition to the revamped user interface, you’ll find these new features as well:

• View Site option. A View Site option has been added to the Menu Drawer so you can view your blogs from within the app.
• Admin area access. You can access the wp-admin areas of your WordPress.com blogs by loading the Dashboard option in the Menu Drawer.
• Faster loading. The WordPress.com Reader now takes advantage of caching for faster loading.
• Updated look and feel. Settings have been converted to use the Android standard for preferences, giving them the Holo look and feel on supported devices. Many views have been updated to the Holo look and feel as well, including the post editor and all list views.
• Improved post editor experience. The post editor now has an expandable content area, which makes it much easier to navigate around the post content when you’re editing.
• Improved image uploading. If a post has an image but fails to upload the image, the post will be saved as a draft first — instead of published — so the image upload can be corrected.

Thanks — and what’s next

We thank the developers who worked so hard on this release – mrroundhill, willnorris, isaackeyet, daniloercoli and aerych – as well as the beta testers who tried out the app over at the Developer Blog. Great work, all!

We also thank Jake Wharton and Simon Vig Therkildsen for creating the ActionBarSherlock and android-menudrawer libraries that enabled us to use the Action Bar and Menu Drawer on older Android devices. Good stuff!

What’s next? We’re looking at adding notifications to the app so you can keep up with what’s happening on your WordPress sites while mobile and on the go.

What would you like to see added to the app?

Want to contribute?

Don’t forget that WordPress for Android is an open source project. Want to get involved? Check out make.wordpress.org/mobile to get started.

Finally, we’re always excited to get feedback on the app. Please feel free to leave a comment here or send a tweet to @WPAndroid.

UI Improvements in Version 2.2.6

The 2.2.6 update of WordPress for Android is now available on Google Play.

Changes in this release

• Small UI Improvements
• Improved support for connecting over HTTPS.
• Crash fixes for #394 and #395.
• Code cleanup and optimization – app size is smaller.

Get involved

Did you know that WordPress for Android is an open source project? If you would like to get involved please visit make.wordpress.org/mobile.

What would you like to see improved in the app? Follow us at @WPAndroid to get in touch!

What’s New

Featured Image Support

Many WordPress themes now have support for setting featured images, and you can now set them right from the app. To set an image as featured, just tap on it after adding it to the post content area and select the ‘Use as featured image’ checkbox. You can also optionally set the image to also be included in the post content.

Note that you’ll need WordPress 3.4.1 or greater and a theme that supports featured images in order to use this feature.

All-New WordPress.com Stats

Checking your stats from the app can be really handy, and we wanted to make it even better. When accessing stats now, you will see all of the same data that you see when at your blog’s web dashboard including Views by Country and Top Posts & Pages. If you are running a self-hosted blog and want to enable stats in the app, install the free Jetpack plugin.

Reliability and Performance Improvements

This release also includes some great improvements to the app to make it more reliable and fast. Error messages are easier to read and understand as well. You can see the details on what was taken care of on the trac roadmap.

New Contributors and What’s Next

Did you know that WordPress for Android is an open source project? We owe a big thanks to the contributors that made this release possible, including aerych, mrroundhill, frankkanis and aagam94! If you would like to get involved please visit make.wordpress.org/mobile.

So what’s next? So far we have plans to improve the ActionBar, post editor and add push notifications for comments. What would you like to see improved in the app? Leave a comment or follow us at @WPAndroid to get in touch!

The dev team is excited to announce that version 2.1 of WordPress for Android is now available! This release adds some great new features, read on to find out more.

What’s New

Comment Editing:

You can now easily edit comments in the app. Just tap the new ‘Edit’ button when viewing a comment and you will be taken to a new screen where you can edit the comment information including the name, email, url, comment text, and status. Big thanks to contributor aerych for adding this feature!

Post Autosave:

To better protect the content you are creating, the app will now autosave posts you are editing every 60 seconds. We’ve also added a safeguard that will make sure that you want to overwrite local changes you’ve made to a post before refreshing the posts list.

New Scaled Image Setting:

Instead of only linking to the full size image, you can now set the width of the linked image to whatever you’d like. To activate the new setting, tap ‘Settings’ and then tap the ‘Upload and link to scaled image’ checkbox. Another big thanks to contributor dolittledk for adding this feature!

Additional Changes:

In addition to these great features, there’s also some other great new additions in the app:

• Small updates to the UI
• New app icon
• Reliability improvements
• Performance tweaks

WordPress.com

New Reader:

There’s an all-new reader in the app that makes it easier than ever to follow your favorite blogs on WordPress.com. We’ve added a bunch of great new features including simplified navigation between posts, the ability to comment on articles you like, and the ability to easily share posts to other apps on your Android device.

Contributors

A round of applause for the fine folks who have worked on this release: dolittledk, aerych, isaackeyet, mrroundhill, are you next?

Get it!

We hope that version 2.1 will make it easier than ever for you to blog while on the go. The app is available today for Android, Nook, and BlackBerry PlayBook devices:

• Google Play Store
• Amazon Appstore
• Nook Store
• BlackBerry App World for PlayBook

How do you like version 2.1 of WordPress for Android? Let us know in the comments section below or tweet us @WPAndroid.

Did you know that WordPress for Android runs on both phones and tablets? Sometimes a little extra screen space can help you draft that longer blog post. If you have a Samsung Galaxy Tab, Motorola Xoom, or another Android tablet you’ll find the WordPress app in the Android Market.

Now for the Nook Color/Tablet and Kindle Fire, too!

We’re happy to announce that WordPress for Android is now available for the Nook Color/Tablet and Kindle Fire. The 7″ screen on these tablets make an excellent home for the all-new Dashboard UI that we added in WordPress for Android 2.0.

We paid special attention to the post editor on theses devices, enhancing the layout to make it super simple to edit your post content in either landscape or portrait orientation. You’ll find everything there that you’d want in a WordPress app, including support for editing post content, adding media, viewing your stats, comment notifications, and more.

The app is available today in the Amazon Appstore and Nook Store.

Feedback

How do you like the tablet WordPress app? Let us know in the comments section below, or ping us on Twitter.

Be sure to subscribe to this blog to stay up to date with the latest happenings around WordPress for Android.

New UI: Action Bar and Dashboard

The Dashboard

Everything you want to do, all in one place. The Dashboard is the first thing you see when launching the app and it provides one-tap access to the most common things you use such as creating a new post or viewing stats. A new comment count ribbon shows you how many unapproved comments you have in your moderation queue. Want to post some media quickly? We added Quick Photo and Video buttons to take you right to the camera so you can shoot the moment and instantly attach it to a new post.

Also new is the Action Bar, which allows you to quickly switch blogs, refresh content or show the Dashboard from wherever you are in the app at the time.

New Post Editor

The Post Editor

The post editor has been revamped, allowing more control over the post content than ever before. A formatting toolbar has been added above the keyboard that allows for easy rich text editing and adding links.  You can now add media content wherever you like and edit the Title, Caption, Placement and Size of images. The editor also is now full screen, so you can see as much of the content as possible while editing.

We’ve also added support for Post Formats, you’ll see a drop down menu in the post editor that allows you to select the appropriate Post Format.

Tablet Support

Got an Android Tablet? We’ve got you covered! We paid special attention to large screen devices in this release. When you’re viewing Posts, Pages and Comments you will see a scrolling list of items on the left, with a detail view on the right. Many other areas of the app have been optimized for tablets including the post editor and stats.

Browsing Posts on a Tablet

We’ve also added support for the newer 7″ tablets, including the Kindle Fire (app will be available in the Amazon Appstore soon).

More Changes

In addition to these great changes above, here’s what else is new:

• Stats chart improvements
• Background post uploading
• WordPress.com Read feature improvements
• Post Status is now displayed in post list.
• Reliability improvements and more!

Get Involved

WordPress for Android is an Open Source project. Many people contributed to this release, including Anirudh who participated in the 2011 Google Summer of Code program and worked on the app for his project. We’d also like to extend a big thanks to all of the beta testers who helped test the app out on their devices before the release. If you want to help make the app better, check out our developer blog for more info.

Download

WordPress for Android 2.0 is available in the Android Market.

The new Read feature in action.

Today we released Version 1.5 of WordPress for Android to the Android Market, which makes it effortless to keep up with your favorite blogs and sites while on the go.

If you’ve connected one of your WordPress.com blogs with the app, you’ll now see a ‘Read’ button at the bottom of your blogs list. Clicking it will display all the latest posts published on the blogs that you follow, along with the option to like or reblog them. You can even follow blogs and sites that aren’t on WordPress.com, as long as they have an RSS feed.

Sweet! How do I add more sites to my reader?

Tap the “Follow” button while viewing any WordPress.com blog (you’ll find it in the top admin bar while logged in) to add it to your reader. To add a site that’s not on WordPress.com, simply enter the URL of the site at the top of your following list and then click ‘Follow’.

Not following any blogs yet? Check out today’s Freshly Pressed to browse some that you might like.

What else is new?

We’ve tweaked a few things here and there in the app, including using the HTML5 video tag for video uploads instead of the outdated QuickTime tag. There are also a handful of bug fixes in Version 1.5 that improve the app’s reliability.

What’s next for WordPress for Android?

We’re excited to let you know that work has already begun on the next major update to WordPress for Android – Version 2.0. It’s going to have a beautiful new look and will be stuffed with awesome new features. For updates on Version 2.0, check out our Developer Blog. And if you have any feedback on Version 1.5 and the new Read feature, be sure to let us know!

Follow @WPAndroid on Twitter for the latest news.

Post Scheduling

You can now easily set the publish date and time in the app when creating a post or page. The date can be set to the future which will set the post status to ‘Scheduled’ and publish on your blog when the time arrives. You can also edit existing posts and tweak the published date and time if desired.

Post Password

At the bottom of the post editor we’ve added a Post Password field to help protect your content. Simply enter a password here and the post will require that the password be entered for viewing on the blog when published. You can also add or remove a password from published posts as well.

HTTP Authentication Support

Is your self-hosted blog protected with an HTTP Authentication username and password? We’ve added support for entering the Authentication credentials in the blog settings so that you can manage your blog through the app. To access the Authentication settings, add a self-hosted blog to the app and select ‘Optional Settings’ in the setup area.

Additional Changes

We’ve tidied up a few more things in the 1.4 update, including:

• Added secure password storage to the local database.
• ‘Unapproved’ comments now have a yellow tint.
• Added ‘Today’ option in stats.
• Fixed crash when alert dialog was trying to be shown after the app was closed.
• Fixed crash related to large post ID values.

Remember, WordPress for Android is an Open Source project. Most of the features in this release were contributed by volunteer developers in the community. Big thanks to chdorner and jnijhof for their hard work! Get in touch with us on our Developer Blog if you’d like to contribute to the project.

WordPress for Android 1.4 is available in Android Market for free. Download it now!

QuickPress Shortcuts

We’ve seen some great support from volunteer developers in the community. A big thanks to contributor Christof Dorner, who added support for QuickPress shortcuts on the Android home screen. Just long press on the home screen, select ‘Shortcuts->QuickPress’ and then select the blog that you would like to use. You will then have an icon on your home screen that takes you directly to the new post screen to start blogging straight away!

Share Post URL to Other Apps

You can now share a link to posts you’ve published on your blog to other Android apps. Just tap the post title and then ‘Share URL’, and then select the app you want to share the link to.

Bug Fixes

This release contains the following bug fixes:

• Use EXTRA_SUBJECT when adding shared content to a post
• Incorrect comment date if moderating from a different time zone than the WP blog’s set time zone
• Spanish translation updates

Grab the update from Android Market now:

Set Post Status

We had one of those “Should have added that a long time ago” moments when we discovered that you couldn’t set the post or page status from the app. Now when you are creating or editing content, you can choose the post status (Draft, Pending Review, Private or Publish).

Oodles of Bug Fixes

We had a look at some of the error reports we get from Android Market and took care of many of the issues that were causing the app to force close:

• Fixed crash when adding media on Dell Streak
• Fixed crash when attempting to add a self-hosted site with an invalid blog URL
• Fixed local db problem when upgrading from a 1.0.x or 1.1.x version
• Updated Polish translation strings
• Fixed crash when trying to add a second blog from a WordPress.com account or WordPress multi-user install
• Fixed no-name blogs from showing as blank in the multi-user blog selection screen
• Comments Loading progress bar no longer hangs

Visit Android Market to download the update, or scan the code: