AS Evan Sims mentions on his blog today, Automattic has released a version of WordPress for the iPhone (a client to connect to your remote blogging system).

There are a least a half dozen plugins for creating a more hospitable environment for managing your content on the iPhone, but quite honestly the quality of the ones I'd tried left a lot to be desired.

He noes that the application is "polished, official and completely native" and includes features that allow you to take a picture with the phone's camera and embed it directly into the post you're writing. Check out the sample video of it in action on an iPhone. You can download it from the App Store for free.

On the CSS Tricks blog there's a recent article showing how to combine the jQuery Javascript library and the SimplePie PHP feed aggregator to create a iPhone/mobile interface to any RSS feed.

We are going to create a web page that is formatted specifically for the iPhone (but would presumably be good for other mobile devices as well). This web page will dynamically fill itself with content from any RSS feed that you give it. The interface is going to be built to be easy to use on a mobile device, with large "touchable" areas and nice (jQuery) animations that whisk you between articles.

They work through the process - five simple steps:

• Create the iPhone Environment
• Pull in the RSS Feed
• Creating the Front Page: Headlines Only
• Creating the Article Pages: jQuery Slider Style
• Adding Some Flair

All code and images needed are included (as well as a demo if you'd like to try it out).

With the recent stir caused by the new iPhone, it's only natural that developers are looking for easy ways to make their sites as compatible as possible with the mobile platform. The Symfony project has posted a guide to helping you make your apps optimized for mobile use.

symfony 1.1 introduces native support for different formats and mime-types. This means that the same model and controller can have different templates based on the requested format. The default format is still HTML but symfony supports several other formats out of the box as defined in the factories.yml file.

Using this system, it's easy to add new output formats by adding to the default layouts the framework comes equipped with. The Content-Type can be changed and layouts can be disabled as needed. This lets you make a custom definition just for use with the iPhone without a lot of hassle.

They also include an example of how to make one of these optimized layouts, including some iPhone "screenshots" of the resulting pages.

On The Bakery today, there's three new examples of how the CakePHP framework was used to create three very different types of sites - PremierMarinas.com, ScienceHack.com and a simple iPhone-compatible application.

• In the first article they describe how they built a "powerful, full featured CMS" to allow their customers to login and work with their personal information. It included the use of JSON messaging and the use of dynamic libraries.
• The article for the second site talks about the creation of a search engine for science videos to provide a more reliable resource for fellow video enthusiasts. He talks about what all he learned in the process and the design of the application. Check out the end result here.
• Finally, the third article talks about the creation of an application for the iPhone - "an app that would allow other users to add RSS feeds and I could go look for some and add them to my collection". He details the process he went through to create the application and the modules that he used to accomplish it.

Check out the rest of The Bakery for more great CakePHP-related articles and tutorials.