WPhone Admin Plugin

While we anxiously await the results of Matt’s judging, I thought I might point out something interesting I’ve noticed. WPhone has been out in the wild for a couple of weeks here and I’ve noticed that quite a few sites are starting to link back to us, a most welcome outcome, to be sure. What has really surprised me, though, has been the level of international interest we’ve been garnering.

For instance, we’ve gotten English-language attention from Philoking, Qualitypeoples, Switchblog, Awsom.org, iPhones in RTP, and AppSafari, among others. In addition to those, though, we’ve been picked up by iPhoneClub.nl (Dutch), Another Pinky Punky (French) (translated), Bloggerpl.com (Polish), Blogwinkel (German), and iFun.de/iPhone (German) (translated).

What could explain this interest? I’m betting our commitment to i18n’ing our plugin as well as the overall greater use and interest mobile browsing gets in non-US countries could account for a good bit of the interest.

Good things, all-around. Here’s to hoping we win!

Since I was looking for a diversion from thinking about tonight’s deadline, I thought I’d whip you up a fresh batch of screenshots to showcase what the 1.3.1 release is all about. Thanks once more to Andrew for providing us with native iPod Touch screenshots of the latest release.

Check them out on our screenshots section, and if you haven’t yet, maybe give the plugin a try. C’mon, you know you wanna! :-)

Here’s hoping you’ll have as much fun using it as we’re having writing it.

Well, our pre-contest work is officially finished, pending any show-stopping bugs that users might report. We actually released two versions of WPhone today. Version 1.3.0 was freshly ported over from the dev tree and included:

• Latest Activity: added a new section to the dashboard to replicate the WP’s Latest Activity features, but without requiring JS as WP does (incoming links).
• Quicklinks: Added quick links to the main features directly from the hide/show “Go…” panel for easier global navigation.
• User search: Added a search form/feature to and tweaked the output of the search listing screen.
• Added display preferences select list in the appropriate user/profile edit forms.
• Styles and xhtml improvements for both the rich and lite interfaces.
• Further improved output compression scheme for faster download and processing performance.
• Bug fixes, thanks to loads of wonderful feedback we had from the WordPress users community.
• Improved on the already pretty good WP backward compatibility front.
• Code: Improved adherence to WP’s coding standards, added function documentation (phpdocs), more hooks, etc.
• And more (see svn log if interested).

Version 1.3.1 was a cosmetic change and simply included better bundled screenshots.

You can grab it from the usual spot or you can just click the link in the sidebar to the right. As always, let us know what you think or any bugs you encounter over in forums.

I’ve updated the Screenshots page with a slew of images captured natively on an iPhone, graciously contributed by forum denizen “andrew”. Many thanks, andrew!

In development news, we are looking to finish off version 1.3.0 which should be our final version of the plugin prior to Monday’s contest deadline. We’re looking into usability and performance improvements as well as a few tools to give blog owners greater insight into the goings-on on their blogs. We’re pretty psyched and hope that y’all will like what we’ve been cooking up.

Given the *ahem* history involving mobile Apple devices and the number 1.1.1, we figured we’d give that revision a miss and head straight to 1.2.0. Plus, there’s more functionality in 1.2 than a simple maintenance revision number bump.

Stephane put a lot of work in this weekend, due largely to the generosity of his new employer who loaned him a Touch for a couple of days. He was able to do a bunch of testing, bugfixing and addressing of nagging UI issues. I’ll let his release notes speak for themselves:

• CSS tweaks to fix spacing issues in the original and updated iPhone/iPod Touch firmwares, as well as in desktop safari, instead of just the latest iPhone/iPod Touch.
• Convenience links on email and URL field where and when appropriate.
• Now launching some links in a new window (target=”_blank”) on devices supporting the feature.
• Added a View/Preview button to the post/page edit forms.
• Misc. navigational tweaks.
• Improved the user experience on webkit devices with no or disabled Javascript support.
• Better browser detection for rich v. lite versions of the interface.
• Custom changes to iUI, submitted upstream to the original project.
• Better, more consistent location bar hiding.

We’re really pretty psyched about this one. All users ought to update ASAP and if you happened to do so this afternoon, well, update again. A version incorrectly tagged as 1.2.0 (oops on my part) slipped out for a few hours. The current trunk/ contains the definitive 1.2.0.

Happy upgrading, and we guarantee that it won’t brick your iPhone.

We’ve released version 1.1.0 of WPhone — grab it from the usual place or just do an svn up if you’re keeping up with trunk.

We established a /branches/dev/ branch in the Subversion repo, so if you’re interested in keeping up to date with the bleeding edge, switch your svn checkout to point to http://svn.wp-plugins.org/wphone/branches/dev. Stephane and Viper did a bunch of coding on the back-end to account for some strange spacing issues we were seeing on mobile Apple devices. The top navigation bar and forms should now size correctly.

We’re still on the lookout for bug reporters and testers on all platforms. Drop by the forums and let us know your experiences.

Stephane found a few quirks in the way the older iUI that we’ve based a lot of code on was handling the iPhone’s default viewport width of 320 pixels, so he made a few quick fixes and then committed the result to the repo.

Hopefully this will take care of the odd sizing and “dancing” that some users have reported when accessing the plugin, especially when using the iPhoney emulator and Safari 3 beta.

We need users of any mobile device to help out and test WPhone, but particularly iPhone and iPod Touch users. Windows Mobile, Palm (Blazer), Nokia N series, etc. are all welcome.

If you’re an owner of just such a device, we’d really appreciate feedback over at the forums.

Thanks!

Well, version 1.0 is out the door — Viper committed the initial set of files over at wp-plugins which means that the official page is also live. He also dropped a note about the release over on wp-hackers to let that crowd in on the excitement.

We’re really excited about this plugin. We feel it offers a lot of functionality to mobile users, regardless of their platform. Hit the About page for a better explanation of the ins and outs of WPhone. And of course, download a copy and try it out yourselves!

You’re looking at the home of the “WPhone Admin Plugin”, not the iWPhone plugin. Our plugin modifies the WordPress backend to work well with not just the iPhone but many mobile devices.

Just so we’re clear.