Some are more ahead of the curve than others. In its recent campaign for its new S60 car, VW used the AdMob platform to target smartphone owners with banners ads and interactive video ads. Here at Wapple we have built sites for many car brands such as Ford, Alfa, Landrover, Nissan and Honda as well as a number of banner campaigns to run on major ad networks.

Great mobile site for Nissan - built by Wapple

Innovation is this sector is rampant. In some cases, QR codes have been used to take the customer from a brochure or TV to a test drive and AutoTrader recently reported that in January this year 45% of its customers had accessed AutoTrader Mobile while ON a dealer’s forecourt to research a car.

Moreover a recent blog from a Google mobile advertising specialist said that more than 13 million people (in the US) will buy a car this year and that they will be engaging with their mobile to do so.

Consequently all companies in the car industry should not just treat mobile merely as a test drive, but more like a fully integrated transport system where the mobile route is as bump-free as all other retail channels. Don’t be a crash test dummy, mobilise that web site now!

That’s millions and millions of page views and ad spend without any respect for the mobile user. Google used 200 diagnostic points to measure each advertiser’s mobile readiness, with criteria such as load time, device detection and mobile optimisation, so this was no lazy PR exercise.

With at least 10% of web sites now accessed by mobile and rising daily, this state of play shows how much more energy needs to be placed on mobile strategy. Sub-standard mobile experiences damage brands and send customers to competitors and underlines how companies, big and small alike, need to treat mobile with as much as respect as they do for all traditional channels.

What it allows you to do, is create a group with a name, then place your campaigns into these groups.

We’ve got some fancy new reports coming soon that will display your campaigns grouped together in a really nice way – but for now, start creating your groups and place your campaigns into them.

But as we’ve improved the Architect schema, one area of documentation we’ve sadly neglected was telling you how to use these advanced Canvas features in your WAPL.

Not any more

We’ve create a new area of documentation with an explanation of how it works – the short version is you create a feature in Canvas (menu / page / poll / etc), grab the ID, and reference that in your WAPL. You then configure all the options you have in canvas through elements and attributes. You’ll find this page on our Canvas Chunks doc.

Also, we’ve added a few pages that tell you how to build FAQs, use Canvas graphics and deliver graphics as wallpapers with the <graphicwallpaperChunk>.

Over the next few weeks we’ll be adding all the other Canvas feature chunks and of course we’ll keep you up to date of what we’re up to! But if you want to give us a call or get in touch about anything specific, we’d be only too glad to talk to you!

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!

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.

Mobile themes

We’d had reports of users not being able to style up their site to make it look snazzy, so rather than leave you with boring themes that won’t inspire anyone, we’ve created some mobile themes for you.  What this means is that to make your mobile blog look cool, all you have to do is choose from one of our new themes in a drop down – how easy is that! Our team of graphic designers have had their crayons out and have hopefully created a theme that you’d like to implement on your blog. Our favourite at the moment is the “Wooden” theme, but there should be something to suit you – check out the screenshots below to see what they all look like.

Wooden

Sky

Coal and Fire

Obsidian

Brushed Metal

Scrap Book

Plugin Compatibility

Another area we’ve had plenty of requests to look at was with compatibility with other WordPress plugins.

Whilst looking at how to create a solution for the PowerPress podcast plugin, I stumbled across a function that turned any shortcode functionality into actual markup, and seeing as the Wapple Architect mobile plugin already turned HTML markup into WAPL, it meant that any plugin using shortcodes is instantly mobilized! Some very popular plugins that have had millions of downloads can now be used on your mobile site – Contact Form 7 is just one example but there are hundreds, if not thousands of other ones that will now work on your mobile phone.

A full list of everything we’ve included in version 2.0 is below – keep reading for the full story.

Major Improvements

• Added pre-designed themes
• Added compatibility for any other plugin that uses shortcodes
• Added full WPMU compatibility – prior to this release, all CSS and images were stored in one location so I’ve now moved this location if you’re using WordPress MU so that multiple blogs will work.

Minor Improvments

• Added switch layout option – if you prefer your site to be displayed with DIVs instead of tables, use this option.
• Added more classes for styling – more customization options for styling
• Compatible with WordPress 2.9

Although this plugin addresses the big issue of mobile themes and we have a feature list as long as your arm, we’re always on the lookout for new ideas and suggestions so please keep them coming!

Finally – have you tried out any of our mobile themes yet? And if so, which one is your favourite? Please let us know!

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!

I’ve fixed a load of bugs, added a stack of new options for configuration and written  a really cool new feature that gives you the option of building your mobile WordPress blog in a completely new way! You can read the scoop below or download it for yourself from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wapple-architect/

Major Improvements

• You can now build your home page by category. So say you’re a newspaper running WordPress and want to display the latest sport articles as well as the latest news articles.  Well now you can! And you also get to choose which category you want on your home page and how many items in that category to display! Linking to the articles works exactly the same way as normal, just a different home page!
• The last release of the 1.4 code was to add support for Cyrillic characters. So not wishing to leave our French and German friends  out, I’ve added support for those two languages! Don’t fear though if you need others (Italian or Polish anyone?), they’ll be coming shortly.
• On a language note, if you want to change the text for any part of the blog that you hadn’t been able to before (Submit text on a search button for example) you can change it whatever you want. If you want it in Ukrainian you can – but equally if you want to just change “submit” to “find”, that’s something that is now available.
• After an email conversation from someone who wanted to simply redirect the web version if a mobile visitor viewed their blog, I’ve added the ability to redirect your web blog to a mobile version. Most of the time it won’t be needed as the plugin handles everything mobile, but for those who really want to redirect, you can.

Minor Improvements

• Caption images in an excerpt are tricky, so I’ve given you the option of removing them. Oh, I’ve added better handling of excerpts too. And images. Much better all round.
• Don’t want to display the post date on the home page (and archive page too for that matter)? Turn it off then as I’ve added an option for it.
• Added the option for displaying a header logo AND the header text. Not everyone has their website text in their logo so you might need both. Or one. Or neither. The choice is yours.
• Show a post thumbnail. The first image from your post can now be displayed (and configured) so that you display a nice thumbnail on the home page.
• Bug fix: Sometimes pages were displayed as if the text was at the top and everything else was at the bottom. Should be fixed now but it’s down to another plugin outputting text too early.
• Bug fix: Some pages were displaying a “more” link on the home page without any text first. Fixed!
• There were a few other bugs that appeared when you entered some characters in either post titles, or page titles, or entered an apostrophe in the mobile blog title / description. They’ve all been fixed and tested!
• Lastly, I’ve improved some areas of documentation. A few fields were misleading and don’t really tell you what they do. I’ve made a few amendments and no doubt there will be more to come. (I like to code, not document!)

Version 1.6? Maybe 2.0?

The next major code release will include an administration panel, so you’ll be able to write and manage posts from your mobile. I’ve got a framework in place for it, it’s not just a case of identifying which admin pages to mobilize, getting on and doing it! Something that big might mean moving to version 2.0 and not just a 1.5->1.6.

If you’ve got any feedback for any of these features, or suggestions for new ones I’ll add all of them to the list in some shape or form. As usual, there are features that people have requested that didn’t make it into this release, but it’s all down on the roadmap and will be addressed at some point!

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!