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!

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:

1. Install the Wapple Architect Mobile Plugin
2. Grab a free dev key from http://wapple.net/register/plugins-signup.htm
3. Activate the plugin and enter your dev key in the Basic settings area
4. Upload a mobile logo
5. Tailor settings so that the mobile version matches the web
6. Style the mobile version so that you retain your brand identity

If you want to read the full article, you can check it out here.

And finally, here is a screenshot of the mobile and web site that shows you how good your mobile blog can look!

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!

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!

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!

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!

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.

Here’s a breakdown of what’s available in the new version:

Next/prev links

If you had more posts than were viewable on your home page, you never used to get a link to “Older entries”. Now there is.

More styling

There’s now a stack load more classes available on a whole load of cells & rows so that you can tailor the style of your mobile site even further.

Multi lingual character support

Foreign characters now get displayed properly – in addition, pasting from Word won’t break it with those pesky double-spaces and dodgy dashes.

Pre-install checks

There’s now a couple of pre-install checks on the system so that if you don’t have SOAP or SimpleXML installed, you get a nice friendly message telling you so! If you call a big red warning message friendly, that is.

New menu items

There’s a configurable option on the posts page so that you can add a handy link back to the home page.

Help

Each admin option is now documented and has a bit of help telling you what each option does.

Anything else

If you’ve got suggestions for even more features, please get in touch and I’ll put it into the roadmap for future releases! If you fancy downloading it for yourself or upgrading, check out the plugins homepage here, there’s full documentation on there about how to install.

Don’t forget that you need a valid Dev Key from Wapple in order to use the plugin. It’s totally free for non-commercial use so why not sign up!

“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:

Hi Jeff,

Thanks for your post. Perhaps some would take it as a flame but I’ll accept it as constructive criticism and a chance to set a few things straight.

Firstly, I’m not sure what you mean when you say that this site doesn’t show up on mobile browsers.

It does.

Are you certain that you typed the URL in correctly? It’s http://mobilewebjunkie.com (you should see this article live on there as well because it’s using the mobile web plugin for WordPress built by Rich G using Architect). Please let us know exactly what you’re experiencing.

But then you go on to say that it’s hard to navigate on phones.  How would you know this if it didn’t work on your phone? I guess it did work after all then?  Perhaps you could elaborate?

Now, let’s talk about ready.mobi.

Ready.mobi assumes a generic site for all mobile phones. The Wapple Architect mobile web plugin for WordPress that this site uses does not generate a static site. Instead it delivers exactly what the device in question requires for its capabilities.

So, I tried http://mobilewebjunkie.com on ready.mobi. I used a useragent for a Nokia N95 as a test (which incidentally, I have and I know that the site works perfectly on it). I could have picked any, but I’m keeping things simple.

So we’re clear before I analyze the results, the resulting site that it tested will have been the optimized version for that particular device. If I’d used a different device the output generated by the Wapple Architect plugin would have been different and tailored to that device’s capabilities.

Here are the so called ‘fails’:

Specify image sizes

Ready.mobi insists that the markup contains width and height attributes in image tags.

These are not required by the N95 and by omitting them the page load times are slightly reduced. On a device that requires image sizes to be specified, the Wapple Architect markup would contain them.

Measures

Ready.mobi says avoid pixel or absolute measures.

The N95 achieves more reliable markup  by specifying measures. If the target device didn’t like them, they would not be there.

Page Size Limit

Ready.mobi complains if it decides the page is too big.

Look, it’s 2009. The idea that pages have to be 5k is so out of date my toes hurt.

Large Graphics

Ready.mobi says don’t make graphics above 200 pixels wide.

Again, here we are delivering the right size graphics to the phone. So, in this case the screen is larger than 200 pixels so we want to see graphics that big. They look great. Hey, the whole site looks great. If we were using a device with a smaller screen, then the graphics would be smaller. That’s the beauty of Wapple mobile browser detection and device optimization technology, Exhibit – and Wapple in general.

External Resources

Ready.mobi is complaining that the site references external resources. I think it means the external style sheet.

This is fine on an N95. It isn’t on some phones and in those cases the Wapple Exhibit engine wouldn’t do it. But in this case the site benefits from external resources because they are cached and the page itself is dynamic. This means faster load times.

All these fails are there because ready.mobi assumes that you have ONE version of a site for ALL devices.

Get a grip, that’s just stupid. It might work for ‘crap wap inc.’ but not for anyone serious in mobile internet. Read ‘Coding for Mobile Web – Automatically Adapting to Every Device and Browser’.

The Wapple platform allows you to build ONE site that dynamically adapts and works perfectly on ALL devices.

Quickly, I’ll look at the warnings ready.mobi flags.

MIME types: Some devices LIKE things the way Wapple does it. Please remember there is a dynamic engine here, not a static, generic service.

Use of stylesheets / stylesheet dependency: The N95 handles stylesheets. Therefore, a stylesheet is used.

Tables: (this is the BIGGEST clue that ready.mobi expects a rubbish generic site for all devices) They say that tables are not supported by all devices – correct, so Wapple only uses tables when it can.

Access keys: They are not needed or wanted by the site. An option would turn them on, but hey what use are they on modern devices without a keypad anyway!

Caching:  Caching is handled correctly for this site.

The bottom line is that the site works really well on all devices. The wordpress plugin is every evolving and based on sound technology that serves some of the largest brands in the world.

The Wapple Platform.

You describe Wapple as a wurfl rip off hosting solution.

What? Seriously, how are you comparing the two?

I have a ton of respect for wurfl. It’s a useful resource of information about devices with some attached tools. But really, how is Wapple a rip off of that?

Have a look at Wapple. I’d be happy to set you up for a full demonstration of the CMS, site builder, etc. I’m sure you’ll love it. Really, take me up on that. You can also sign-up for our developer program.

Wurfl is information. Wapple is a complete building and publishing system with a full GUI and a stack of developer focused tools for writing at an application level.

You simply cannot compare the two.

Jeff, I thank you for your comment. I really do. I hope that you read this reply and take me up on the offer of a tour of the tech. I also hope that you understand that the mobile internet is what you, the builder, make it. Wapple tech delivers it. Appropriately.

By the way, try http://dotmobi.mobi on your phone… [grin]