Mobile Web Junkie

This week has seen a couple of updates to the Wapple Architect Mobile Plugin for WordPress.

First up, there was an update to the way that videos are handled on mobile pages. It turns out that in one of the WordPress updates (somewhere between the 2.8 and 2.9.2 versions), the way that videos were output to the browser changed slightly. This meant that the video parser in our mobile plugin didn’t pick up the correct source and didn’t show the video.

All fixed now though.
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Last week I did a podcast with Brian Prows from MobileBeyond. We went through quite a bit – from how you can mobilize your WordPress blog with our mobile plugin to how in a future release of the plugin you’ll be able to place Mobile Adverts on your blog and make a bit of money out of it.

You can listen to the whole thing on Brian’s website at http://mobilebeyond.net/mobilizing-and-making-money-with-a-wordpress-blog-or-mobile-website/ or have a search on iTunes for MobileBeyond.

Lastly, I must say a big thank you to Brian for first of all giving me the opportunity to do the podcast, and secondly for doing such an awesome job of editing it together!

Let us know what you thought of the podcast – and if you’d like to hear more, tell us what subjects you’d like us to cover!

Just before Christmas, we mobilized HowToMakeMyBlog.com by installing and configuring the Wapple Architect Mobile Plugin for WordPress.

I’ve written a much more in-depth article over there about how we did it, but here’s a bite-sized version that you can cut out and put in your wallet:
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Two weeks ago Automattic released a new version of WordPress (2.9). As it’s Christmas, we thought we’d enter into the spirit of things and release an updated version of the Wapple Architect Mobile Plugin for WordPress as a present.

We’ve listened to all of your feedback, ideas and suggestions – and as we’ve now got a fancy issue tracking system, we’ve been able to prioritise all of them and create a development roadmap. However, saying that, it became pretty obvious what the focus of this release was going to be – mobile themes.
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Last month we published a new mobile plugin to the wordpress.org plugin repository called WordPress Mobile Admin. It won’t surprise you to hear that it does exactly what it says on the tin and mobilizes your WordPress control panel.
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WordPress Mobile Admin is a fully featured WordPress control panel for your mobile. It works on every device – no matter what it’s capabilities, so it doesn’t matter if you don’t have an iPhone or BlackBerry, you can still manage and update your blog whilst you’re on the go.

It uses Wapple’s advanced web services to produce perfect markup whilst at the same time maintaining the familiar look and feel of WordPress. You can write and edit posts, moderate and reply to comments as well as updating and managing tags, categories and pages.
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What’s this!? Blogging from my mobile? Testing a new service for wordpress, designed by Rich Gubby using Wapple Architect… All to be revealed soon!

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been releasing updates to my wordpress plugin. A bug fix here, a new option there. You’ve got configurable menus, support for Cyrillic character sets and much, much more.

But the backlog of new features has been growing and it needed a big update to clear the decks! So yesterday signalled the release of the latest incarnation of my Wapple Architect Mobile Plugin for WordPress – version 1.5!

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After a number of releases of the mobile plugin for WordPress, you’d think I’d want to put my feet up for a bit and have a well deserved rest and a cup of tea. But not a bit of it! I’ve been burning the midnight oil to get version 1.4 ready for release so that you have even more control and even more ways to mobilize your blog.
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Since its launch in June, the Wapple Architect Mobile Plugin for WordPress has seen a huge amount of usage. So much so that it now deserves a showcase article discussing success stories so far about blogs that have installed the plugin.

Hopefully your site is one of those featured, but if not, don’t despair because I’m going to include a few tips and tricks at the end of this article that will mean that in the next showcase, I can’t fail to include yours!
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Today marks another significant milestone in the evolution of the Wapple Architect mobile plugin for WordPress – version 1.2 has been released into the wild!

There’s been some great feedback from version 1.1 as well as a whole load of suggestions and feature requests and I’ve tried to implement as many of them as I can.

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We received the following comment from Jeff Miller on the ‘removing scrollbars‘ article.

“Your site doesnt even show up on any mobile phone, other than maybe an iphone. But doing a test on your site it show up very bad on other phones which most of the world use. it only scores a 3/5 on ready.mobi and its very hard to navigate on phones. Obviously you are not the mobile web junkie but the wapple (wurfl rip off hosting solution) for iphone junkie.”

Ouch. Oh well, there’s always one… The reply got kinda long but turned out to be quite a good read. So I thought it would be nice to post it as an article. Here it is: Read more

You’ve installed my Wapple Architect Mobile Plugin for WordPress and entered your Dev Key only to find that although your mobile blog looks great, it doesn’t look as awesome as some of the other blogs that are using the plugin.

So what can you do about it? Luckily for you I’ve compiled a list of some of the top tips to make your blog look awesome on mobile, just follow it and by the end of it you’ll have a great looking mobile site.
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As I needed to create a home page for my WordPress mobile plugin other than that at wordpress.org, I’ve created this post in order to fulfill both that need and provide a forum for people to comment and contribute.

The text is taken straight from the readme file, so if you’ve arrived here rather than the official page at WP, at least you can get the information you need! If you just want to download the plugin, here’s a direct link.

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Mobile Web Junkie

As I mentioned in my article regarding the release of my mobile WordPress plugin, the results of my plugin on a standard install of WordPress are awesome and blogs look amazing on mobile web (as you can see from the screenshot).

But because of the open source nature of WordPress, there are a whole load of other plugins that could be mobilized in order to work in tandem with mine. Content plugins that generate really simple HTML will already be catered for because of checks I perform on the content, but more specific code that outputs JavaScript or something a little bit out of the ordinary will need a little bit more attention to work perfectly.

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