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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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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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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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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Following hot on the heels of my article about How I Mobilized WordPress, I’m pleased to report that version 1.0 of my mobile plugin is now available on wordpress.org!

If you want to get it for yourself, head over to http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wapple-architect/, have a read of the documentation and activate it on your own blog!

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So you’ve got your WordPress site running, you’ve installed a load of plugins to do fancy things and there’s a large subscriber base following your every post. However, without realising it, you’re giving a poor user experience to anyone reading your blog on their mobile phone. Have a read of “Why Millions of WordPress Bloggers Need to get Mobile Friendly” to see why this is such a big problem.

To help the community at large, I’ve created a WordPress mobile plugin and theme that provides a perfect WordPress experience to mobile web users and here’s how and why I did it.
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If you’ve been living under a rock for the last few years and have never heard of WordPress, it’s a free to use, open source publishing system.

It’s one of the biggest and best around, with over 5,000,000 people publishing hosted blogs on wordpress.com and millions more using software they’ve downloaded from wordpress.org.

I’ve done a lot of research to discover that very few of these sites actually render well on mobile, here are a couple of screenshots of what a popular WordPress site looks on my Nokia N73:

http://ma.tt

As you can see it doesn’t look that great and is totally unreadable and usable on mobile. It also took 2-3 minutes to load and cost me a small fortune in data charges.

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