WPhone Admin Plugin

While being quite new, WPhone has already been used to blog about or from some pretty unusual places: keeping in touch from the middle of the Moroccan desert, covering an international Santa convention, etc.

We’d like to hear from you! If you would like to share an unusual story or picture of how you moblog with WPhone, please email us at stories@wphoneplugin.org. You can also email us a link to your blog, if you posted the story instead.

We’ll to post our favorite ones on this blog, so keep them coming! :-)

Thanks to Matt, I can now take iPhone screenshots to my heart’s content. So I’ve updated the set showcased on this site and made a zip archive of 18 screenshots available on the same page.

All the screens in the packaged set are from version 1.4.2. Some will be bundled with the next release and they are also available on the new WPhone page on Facebook.

Following Matt Mullenweg’s lead, I went ahead and established a fan page for WPhone over on Facebook. If you’re an FB user, why not head over there and add yourself as a fan of WPhone? We’ll update fans of upcoming releases, news, etc. using the page — Stephane and myself are currently admins of the page, so we hope to update it frequently.

Stephane tagged up trunk tonight and labeled it as version 1.4.2. This version brings the extra-spicy internationalization sauce, including:

• Added Italian translation (thanks to http://www.lucacicca.it/ for the contrib)
• Added German translation (thanks to http://www.deutsche-franzosische-schule-bildung.de/)
• Added Japanese version (thanks to http://blog.pear.co.jp/)
• Fixed the French translation by renaming the locale files appropriately.
• Dealt with a conflict with another plugin reported by a user. We chose to be the good guys on that one.

Fun, fun all around! *grin*

Grab it from the usual spot or just wait for your plugin dashboard to update you.

We’ve been attracting a lot of international attention with WPhone, including some gracious translation efforts (Google translation) to translate the plugin’s strings into Russian by the Lecactus folks. (It also appears as if these folks have given a go at making WPhone work in Japanese/UTF8. Google’s attempt at translating the page is available here.)

What we would really love would be for some similarly gifted and motivated hackers to contribute their linguistic skills to translating WPhone into other languages, particularly German, Spanish and Polish, as those seem to be some of the more common languages that I see showing up in trackbacks and WPhone-related Google Blog Searches.

If you’re interested in lending a hand, getting your translations distributed with the official plugin and getting credit from us, please leave a comment on this post or over in the forums.

Thanks!

EDIT:

If you’d like to help, check out the WordPress Codex for details on how to use the localization technology and then have at the included localization file that comes with WPhone.

And as always, we’re looking for feedback on the plugin, so if you find something that isn’t easy to translate into your language, let us know and we’ll try to make it better!

So, I was getting all geared up to start taking on the challenge of fully supporting the rich interface on the Android platform, the same way we do on the iPhone/iPod Touch. Android sporting a WebKit browser by default and calling for a minimum of a 200MHz ARM 9 processor, there really should be no reason not to.

But now having found the time to download the cross-platform SDK and trying it on my development sandbox, I’ll venture to say that it might just be a bit easier than I thought. :-)

Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t call it 100% functional quite yet, especially if you’re emulating a device without a touch screen (keypad nav), but it’s not bad at all for a start. Everything is mostly working: navigation, forms, effects, etc. From what I’ve been able to see, all of the required tweaks reside at the CSS level, as well as Javascript (although less so).

This sure gives me hope for supporting the same rich interface on Nokia’s S60WebKit browser for their Linux and hopefully Symbian devices.

The future is bright indeed. But the present it quite shiny on its own!

Stephane up’n tagged, bagged and released version 1.4.1 of WPhone last night. Those of you with WordPress 2.3 installed ought to get notified by the plugin updater that it’s in the wild, but for the rest of you, version 1.4.1 contains the following goodness:

• Added Russian and French translations (props to http://lecactus.ru/ for the RU contrib).
• Nokia devices compatibility fix.
• Fixed a “View Site” bug when the blog url is different from the WordPress install one (props to tieum for spotting it).
• Added extra checks to make sure we do not gzip the output when when php zlib.output_compression is already used by default on the server.

We’re pretty proud of the work we’ve done and, I think it safe to say, want WPhone to continue existing and developing long after the contest’s close.

…us!

Many thanks to those of you in the forums that provided us with valuable feedback and bug reports.

Congrats also to Dan and Jared for their excellent work on their entry.

We’re totally stoked, to steal a Cali surfer phrase.

Viper and Stephane have been hard at work making some behind-the-scenes improvements to WPhone, so much so that it calls for a full .1 version bump (and not simply a +.x.1 bugfix bump). We’ve done some code clean-ups as well as some performance tweaks that should make sites running WPhone just a bit faster than they already are. *chuckle*

Plus, a very cool and oft-requested feature — the straight dope from the release notes for what’s new/changed reads as follows:

• Plugins management: You can now activate or deactivate installed WP plugins from the new Plugins screen. [Woot! -ed.]
• Addressing a rich interface false positive with Nokia/WebKit based devices until we can gain access to such devices to try and fully support them under the CSS+JS interface. [i.e., once we win the contest. *grin* -ed.]
• Backward compatibility fix in the post/page form.
• Ajax improvements in global navigation and dashboard links.
• Miscellaneous bug fixes, tweaks and improvements.

That about sums it up for us. You can of course get the release in the usual spot or you can wait for your Plugins page to ping you.

Some might ask themselves why we decided to rewrite and develop a separate WordPress Admin in close parallel to what is being done in the WP core, instead of simply re-skinning the standard output to seemingly achieve the same goal.

Although the above statement is in itself not entirely accurate given our thorough adherence to the WordPress Admin API and development guidelines wherever possible, the answer can be summed up in two word: universal access.

Because we’ve committed to support the widest array of platforms possible right from the beginning (from iPhone to braille readers), based on the overwhelming feedback from the original wp-hackers thread that instigated this project, things such as low memory specs, slow processors and networks, common lack of server-side scripting, countless navigation and usability paradigms and so on truly defined the core of our design choices when it comes to both WPhone’s back and front ends. The fact of the matter is that these elements are not a focus of the standard WP Admin, nor should they entirely be (although accessibility has always been an important part of the WP core team’s efforts).

Will these decisions pay off for us personally in the competition context? I’m not sure; both contestant apps are pretty neat tools. But what we’re sure of is that it’ll pay off for our user base, and is ultimately the most important to us. :o)