When we built WordPress Mobile Admin, we knew that there would be bloggers from all over the world wanting to use it. And because WordPress is multi-lingual, our plugin had to be as well. It made little sense to hard code all the labels and values in English, when someone might want to edit their blog in French, Italian, or Japanese!

These are flags of a few languages that we’ve already seen WordPress Mobile Admin operational in and more are popping up every day. It’s not just available in a couple of languages either, it’s available in every language WordPress is available in. There are 67 official ones so far, but the full list can be found here.

To get WordPress Mobile Admin (and WordPress in general) working with different languages, check out http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress_in_Your_Language, it’ll really help you along.

And of course, if you are using WordPress Mobile Admin in something other than English, get in touch and let us know!

Trouble is – the old version of WordPress Mobile Admin didn’t have any of the human readable text wrapped in those functions so it was only available in English, despite the fact that probably 95% of the text it used had already been translated. By going through and wrapping those text segments has meant that the entire Mobile dashboard has been mobilized.

Internationalization was where we spent most of our time on for this release, but it wasn’t the only focus. In addition, we’ve looked at textarea boxes and in particular, anywhere you can enter text in the mobile dashboard – editing posts and pages for example.

We found that some phones have troubled scrolling with lots of text in text input boxes (iPhone’s for example), so we’ve added some JavaScript in to help things run a bit smoother. And because we’re using Wapple Architect, phones that don’t support JavaScript don’t get it.

We hope you enjoy the update to the plugin and would love to hear from you if you use WordPress Mobile Admin in a language other than English and if you use an iPhone and scrolling is a bit nicer!

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.

Bug Fixes

Next up there were a couple of bug fixes:

• A quick one to fix a couple of foreign char issues – there was a string that wasn’t being escaped – it is now.
• Even quicker one to parse links before lists – that means that if you have a link inside a list, it’ll now work ok and not throw an error.

Mobile Themes

And last, but certainly not least, were a couple of awesome new mobile themes – designed by Ryan DC. He did the last set (Wooden/Scrap Book/Obsidian), but he’s outdone himself with the latest 2 – iPhone Light and iPhone Dark – here they are in action:

Thanks for the designs Ryan, very much looking forward to the next set!

So there you have it – a couple of theme improvements, a minor bug fix here and a tweak there. Have you used any of the new themes yet, or maybe you’re using one of the older mobile themes but have tweaked them yourselves? I’d love to see a comment if you have!

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.

Prior to creating the plugin, we canvased a number of power mobile bloggers and asked their opinions on what features would be useful in a mobile plugin. We didn’t want to completely re-create the WP dashboard on mobile, but rather create a dashboard with features that would only be appropriate whilst you’re using your handset.

Top Features

It became pretty obvious that creating posts, being able to upload photos and moderate comments were the most popular requests, so they were installed as the top priorities and implemented pretty much straight away. Another top priority was to make the mobile dashboard look and feel like the web dashboard as much as possible as we wanted to keep the user experience as consistent as possible. The theory being that if you’ve used the WordPress control panel on web, you should know where everything is on mobile without having to look around too much.

And with those tasks done, the plugin was released. Job done – well, almost..

Upgrades and downgrades

As with any software, there are plenty of bug reports, feature requests and performance upgrades that all require implementing – so after collating them all, they were entered into Trac, were prioritised and worked on.

One of the most interesting feature requests that came in was for the mobile plugin to work on PHP4. We’ve always made it a requirement in our plugins (not just wordpress) that you had to have SimpleXML and as this came as standard with PHP5 – you needed this too. But we found an awesome class on phpclasses.org called SimpleXML for PHP4 by Taha Paksu, that with a little tweaking, did the same job as the native SimpleXML functions.

By wrapping the class creation in a function called “simplexml_load_string” (and wrapping that inside a if !function_exists(‘simplexml_load_string’)), we’d got SimpleXML functionality with PHP4 – result!

In addition to this, we’ve added features so you can manage your tags and categories on mobile as well as create tags inside posts – all in the same way you’d do on web. We’ve also replicated the admin colour scheme switcher so if you prefer the Blue theme to Gray, you can display that on your phone!

Cutting to the chase – here is the list of features and new functionality that have been bundled into version 2.0.

New Feature list

• Removed dependancy on simpleXML – now works with PHP4
• Footer now present on Login page – frames page nicely
• Added edit post tags page
• Added delete/add post tags
• Added edit categories page
• Added delete/add categories
• Added customized colour schemes
• Added ability to edit tags when adding/editing a post
• Bug fix: Show correct number of posts on edit posts page
• Bug fix: Fixed pingbacks on comments page

No more dependancies

What this means is that we’ve been able to completely remove the “Things you must have..” section in the readme file for WordPress Mobile Admin. All dependancies have been removed and another barrier to mobile has been removed! We’re going to be rolling out the same PHP4 upgrades across all of our other plugins – keep an eye out for those if you’ve been waiting for that feature!

If you want to check out the new version of WordPress Mobile Admin for yourself, head over to http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-mobile-admin/ and download it. Alternatively, if you search for “wordpress mobile admin wapple” in the Add New Plugin section on your own WordPress control panel, you can install it automatically.

If there are any other features you’d like to see in the next version, leave a comment and let us know!

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.

WordPress Mobile Admin

Requires at least:2.6
Tested up to: 2.9.2
Stable tag: 2.5

Features

• Add new posts from mobile
• Post pictures from your mobile phone and dictate where they appear on the post
• Post, Page, Tag and Category Management
• Comment Moderation – including replying to comments
• User Profile page – including colour schemes
• Support for gravatars

This plugin uses the same technology as the Wapple Architect Mobile Plugin and if you like this plugin, you’ll love that one. Check out the home page here: Wapple Architect Mobile Plugin for WordPress

Installation

1. To install through WordPress Control Panel:
   • Click “Plugins”, then “Add New”
   • Enter “WordPress mobile admin” as search term and click “Search Plugins”
   • Click the “Install” link on the right hand side against “WordPress Mobile Admin”
   • Click the red “Install Now” button
   • Click the “Activate Plugin” link
   • Enter your Wapple Architect dev key into the settings page. You can get one from here Wapple Dev Key Registration
2. To download and install manually:
   • Download latest version from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-mobile-admin/
   • Upload the entire `wordpress-mobile-admin` folder to the `/wp-content/plugins/` directory.
   • Activate the plugin through the `Plugins` menu in WordPress.
   • Enter your Wapple Architect dev key into the settings page. You can get one from here Wapple Dev Key Registration

Download Plugin .zip

The control panel of WordPress Mobile Admin is in `Settings` > `Mobile Admin`.

If you want to use the WordPress Mobile Plugin with WordPress MU as a site-wide plugin, install the “wordpress-mobile-plugin” folder in the plugins directory and activate on a site-by-site basis.

Frequenty Asked Questions

How do I get a dev key?

Head over to Wapple and fill out the simple form, you should be able to get your dev key within a couple of minutes!

Why doesn’t the plugin work? I see the web version on my mobile!

Have you entered your dev key into the Wapple Architect settings?
If not, head over to Settings > Wapple Architect (or Options > Wapple Architect if you’re on version 2.3.3 and under) and enter it into the “Dev Key” input box.

Do I need SOAP and SimpleXML running for this plugin to work?

In older versions of the plugin, you needed SOAP and SimpleXML, but not any more! From version 2.0, the dependancy on SimpleXML has been totally removed! You also do not need SOAP and can communicate with Wapple’s web services via REST.

File Uploads seem to be breaking my site

On some handsets on certain networks, file uploading doesn’t work. Even though the mobile phone supports it, it doesn’t like it. If you find you’re having problems with posting, head to “Dashboard”, then “Profile” and turn it off for your user.

Screenshots

Changelog

• Version 2.5
  • Added option to choose what size of mobile uploaded image you want to use in your posts
• Version 2.4.1
  • Fixed bug with foreign chars on comment titles
• Version 2.4
  • Fixed bug with guest users getting wrong message when trying to view categories
  • Fixed issue with adding posts in a different timezone to the where the server is
• Version 2.3
  • Fixed bug with some sites logging on, removed filter for login and authenticate
• Version 2.2
  • Added switch to mobile/desktop option in footer
• Version 2.1
  • Fixed warning message when no result back from web service call
  • Added compatibility for WordPress 2.9
• Version 2.0
  • Removed dependancy on simpleXML
  • Works with PHP4
  • Footer now present on Login page – frames page nicely
  • Added edit post tags page
  • Added delete/add post tags
  • Added edit categories page
  • Added delete/add categories
  • Added customized colour schemes
  • Added ability to edit tags when adding/editing a post
  • Bug fix: Show correct number of posts on edit posts page
  • Bug fix: Fixed pingbacks on comments page
• Version 1.2.1
  • Fixed bug when web theme has dynamic style sheet and loads up various functions
• Version 1.2
  • Added bulk actions to comment moderation
  • Added post date to add and edit posts
• Version 1.1.1
  • Fixed bug when there is an admin path that isn’t in the top level
• Version 1.1
  • Added filter posts by type on posts page
  • Fix for really long comments
  • Added option to enter a post excerpt
  • Fixed image post size issue
  • Added compatibility with older WordPress versions
  • Added compatibility with WordPress 2.8.6
• Version 1.0.4
  • Fixed foreign chars bug
• Version 1.0.3
  • Added compatibility with WordPress 2.8.5
• Version 1.0.2
  • Fixed compatibility issue when you don’t have PHP5
• Version 1.0.1
  • Fixed admin bug
• Version 1.0
  • Post images from mobile
  • Comment moderation
  • Post editing
  • Gravatar support

Content Management Systems – it seems as though they are the in-vogue tool at the moment with every man and his dog developing one or using it to power their website.

If you do a search in a well known popular search engine for “CMS” (and assuming you aren’t searching for the Church Mission Society), you’ll find Joomla at #3. With 139 million returned results that’s not bad by anyone’s standards.

As well as that, anyone publishing a list of the top five or ten CMS’s can’t fail to include Joomla. It’s had over 10 million downloads and is used on websites from travel companies in Hawaii, hotel reservation systems in Belgium to everything in between. I’m sure at one point NASA has used it for various sites so if it’s good enough for Buzz Aldrin and his chums it’s good enough for me.

Joomla on mobile?

Joomla Demo Site on Mobile

But what does Joomla provide out of the box for your mobile visitors?

Not a great deal is the short answer. I tried to access the Joomla demo site on a couple of handsets – you can see the results on the screenshots to the left.

It’s the usual story of having to view web pages in your tiny mobile window, painfully slow downloads and an awful user experience. You’ll remember that this is the same sorry tale faced by millions of WordPress bloggers until I released a mobile plugin for it, so to even things up a bit in the battle of the CMS’s, I’ve written a mobile plugin for Joomla. WordPress 1 – 1 Joomla (Drupal 0 but more on that later!). Learn more about the reasons why you need to optimize to mobile devices here.

The usual rules apply – it’s free for non-commercial (plus ‘free to try’ for commercial) and you need to sign up for a Wapple dev key to use it. But once installed, you won’t ever have to worry about your mobile visitors again as the plugin takes care of everything for you.

Joomla Mobile Plugin Options

Graphics are resized dynamically to suit the handset, menu’s are configurable as are a whole bunch of image options – there’s even somewhere to input your newly acquired dev key!

Worried about your site being Search Engine Friendly? You should be and you’ve probably installed a plugin to help you out. But what about mobile – you don’t want to have to go through the whole process again. Fear not as my plugin retains all URLs from web to mobile allowing you to promote one single domain and have Google spider a single set of website addresses.

Older phones are catered for as much as newer ones – it’ll look as good as is humanly possible on an old WML browser and will look stunning on a swanky new iPhone. With regards to styles, the plugin tries to replicate the look and feel of the selected website theme so you’ll only need a little bit of CSS tinkering to achieve fantastic results.

The MDA

I’ll write a post at a later date that describes in infinite detail the nitty gritty of how it all comes together, but if you want to see it in action, head over to www.themda.org -  it’s already being powered by our Joomla plugin! There is a screenshot to the right too of how it looks on mobile.

Get the Joomla Mobile Web Plugin!

If you’ve got a Joomla powered website and fancy getting a copy of my plugin and template, check out the plugins section of our site and download it for yourself!

Here’s a quick reminder of why you would want to mobilize your Joomla site:

• Will fit perfectly to every screen
• Future proof for bigger or more obscure displays
• 5% of website traffic now gets hit by mobile devices (read more)
• Retains SEO for mobile and keeps your URLs SEF
• Single domain promotion for both web and mobile (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.

I’ve had plenty of positive feedback from users of the plugin as well as some great suggestions for new features and functionality and have done my best to try to incorporate all of them. A few have inevitably fallen by the way side for this version, but rest assured, any ideas you provide have or will be logged, categorized, filed in an important folder and put on the roadmap for future releases.

So without further ado, here are the features that have made it into version 1.4

Major Improvements

• Removed dependency for SOAP. The Plugin now falls back to REST services to those without SOAP installed.
• Compatibility with WordPress 2.8.4
• Speed improvements. I’ve analyzed the core code and squeezed a little  so your mobile pages load faster.
• Fix for foreign characters. WordPress handles posts just fine, but it doesn’t play that nicely with pages and titles. There are now measures in place to handle all character maps on mobile.
• Added the option to switch to the mobile version of the site if you’re using the website. You could already switch from mobile to web, but now you can go both ways.

Minor Improvements

• Captions – they are a pain as they aren’t a standard HTML tag, but no matter, they should be handled for mobile a bit better in this version. Oh, and there is a class applied to the caption too so it’s styleable.
• Fixed strange bold tags appearing. The text editor in WP sometimes adds an extra strong tag – a bit of cleanup takes place now to handle this.
• Added option: Show tags on a post page.
• Added support for characters in your footer so you can have a copyright symbol for example – read more about that at wapl.info.
• Added options: Transparency colour on images. You now have ability to specify which colour you want as the background for an image wherever it appears on your site.
• Support for smiley images. Tiny smiley images (and tiny logos) shouldn’t be scaled up to fit the screen – in version 1.4 they don’t.
• Added option: Different post page header image. Once you’re in your site and looking at posts, you might want a slightly different, maybe smaller image at the top of your page, you’ve got the option to upload one in the control panel.
• Better support for bold, italic and underline text. It’s a WP editor issue again that hopefully has been resolved.
• Added classes so you can style homepage excerpts – a must if you want some sort of divider between posts.

What’s next?

Version 1.5 is being planned even as I write this post. In fact, version 2.0 has already had a bit of thought put into it. But keep those ideas coming as the community at large is becoming the driving force behind new functionality and it’s great to see! Get in touch and let us know what you think!

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!
But before showing you a few screenshots of great looking blogs, here’s an overview of why the plugin is so different to other ones and a list of some of the features available.

Why it’s different to other plugins

• Other mobile plugins for WordPress use a default mobile style which results in an inconsistent experience for your users, Wapple Architect Mobile plugin for WordPress retains the styling of your site from web to mobile.
• There’s no redirection to a mobile version of the blog – URLs are exactly the same on web and mobile giving you the ability to promote and use one single domain!
• No transcoding happens here – the mobile version is written in WAPL (an advanced mobile markup language) that results in a completely tailored solution perfect for your mobile visitors.
• Other plugins try to replicate every single feature and plugin you’ve installed onto the mobile version. We know what mobile users want and have written this plugin with that in mind – the result is a far better user experience.

Features

• Every single mobile device is detected and all aspects of your blog are tailored to the visiting handset. Sites aren’t dumbed down to the lowest common denominator but instead use the features and functionality that advanced phones offer.
• Devices are detected by using Wapple’s advanced web services instead of relying on inferior 3rd party tools. If you view your blog with a brand new, never before seen handset, it’ll still work perfectly!
• Any theme you’ve installed and have styled for web will be carried across to mobile giving you a consistent look and feel for each and every one of your visitors.
• Dynamic resizing of images
• Retain SEO, preserve your URL structure and promote one single domain
• Support for multi-lingual characters – even funny characters that make their way onto your blog (from a copy and paste from Word for example) are handled.
• Comment from mobile! Turn on the feature and your visitors can leave comments from their handset.
• Upload mobile specific header/footer images – resized on the fly to fit a visitors handset perfectly
• Place mobile friendly navigation links around your site to help users browse around your blog
• Advanced pagination – split up long posts into manageable chunks that make reading a post on mobile easier
• Complete freedom over how you want to style your mobile site. We’ve done our best to make the mobile stylesheet as comprehensive as possible but no doubt there will be a few things you want to change – you can by editing a few settings.
• Control over almost every element on your mobile page:- change the size and quality of images on posts and pages, show tags and categories in different sections, you can even change the wording of certain elements on your site!
• Plus much much more! For a full feature list, visit the plugin homepage here.

Gallery

So without further ado, here are some screenshots of great looking mobile blogs that are using the Wapple Architect Mobile Plugin for WordPress (click the thumbnail for a bigger view).

WordPress Showcase - Mobile Web Junkie

WordPress Showcase - Red Yellow

WordPress Showcase - Blackberry Boards News

WordPress Showcase - Ben90

WordPress Showcase - The MDA

WordPress Showcase - Evo Hosting

Each one of these sites has been adapted from the standard install of the mobile plugin. Changing it to your particular need is easy work even for a style novice – so far the largest amount of customization has been 10 lines on The MDA Blog. There are classes and IDs available on all elements so you can really get creative but if you need some help and guidance, get in touch.

Tips for making your mobile site look better

With so many options to configure with this plugin, creating a mobile friendly blog is easy. But if you want a bit more help, here are a few great tips that we’ve used to create some amazing looking mobile blogs.

• Upload a header image into the “Basic Settings” section of the Wapple Architect settings page. The best logos that work on mobile are ones that have solid colours in the background and are as big as possible – the image will be dynamically resized on the fly to fit a visitors mobile phone so anything over 500 pixels in width is good.
• Don’t forget that once you’ve selected an image, change the “Use Mobile header Image” option to be “Yes”
• Turn on commenting on posts. In the “Posts Settings” area, change the “Allow comments on posts” to “Yes”.
• If you have lots of really long posts, turn on “Do Pagination” under “Posts Settings” – it’ll dynamically chop up your posts into mobile friendly pages. If you want even more control over pagination, change the “Post length” setting to something suitable – around 2000 is what we’ve found to be the magic number.
• Turn on the “Show home link” and “Show next/previous links” in “Posts Settings”. This will put some handy navigation links at the top and bottom of the page back to the homepage and to the next and previous posts – remember, it’s harder for mobile users to navigate so they need all the help you can give them.

Finally, the biggest tip we can give you is to get styling!

Whilst we’ve made every effort to ensure that the mobile version of your blog looks as much like the website as possible, there’s always room for improvement. So delve right into the 2 mobile stylesheets – they’re both in the “Mobile Theme Settings” area. You can change anything in there but the 2nd one is where you really want to place your custom styles.

With just a few minutes work customizing your mobile blog, it’s easy to create something that looks far better than if you’d have used a standard mobile template or even worse, have it transcoded!

Let me know how you get on and if you do create a blog you think is worthy of being showcased, let me know the URL so I can include it next time!

We’ve already released plugins and components for a number of different applications – CakePHP, Joomla and WordPress to name a few.

But what happens if you’re not running one of these apps but still need a mobile friendly website? If you don’t have the time or patience to write the mobile tools yourself using WAPL our latest offering might be just what you’ve been looking for!

We’ve released a package on phpclasses.org which provide you with a whole suite of builder classes and functions to make the process of building your mobile website easier. There’s a function that creates a SOAP client, another one to check you’ve got SOAP and some that actually write your WAPL for you. It’s already proved to be pretty popular and was placed comfortably in the top 5 most popular downloads of the week for the majority of its first week!

It’s written in PHP but the technology could easily be ported across to Perl, Ruby or whatever language you want to write in. We’re planning a Perl package to do something similar and we’re always on the lookout to create new packages in other languages – if you’ve got a specific one in mind, get in touch and we’ll see what we can do.

I’ll be writing a tutorial on how to build a functioning mobile site using just these classes and there’ll be more to come on that later, but in the mean time why don’t you grab the code for yourself, sign up for a dev key and get building mobile sites!