Mobile Web Junkie

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:
Read more

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.
Read more

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.
Read more

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!

Read more

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.
Read more

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!
Read more

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.

Read more

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

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.

Read more

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!

Read more

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.
Read more

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.

Read more