Plugins 022 – WPtouch Mobile Smartphone (iPhone, G1 Android, Palm Pre) WordPress plugin

Today we’re covering the WPtouch mobile smart phone WordPress plugin.

The WPtouch Mobile Theme plugin adds a mobile friendly interface to your blog’s web site. The plugin allows you to quickly add support to your blog web site for mobile phones such as the iPhone, Blackberry, Google Android G1/myTouch and the new Palm Pre. Installation is simple and configuration options are easy to configure.

Features include:

  • Clean navigation interface in an iPhone friendly format.
  • Supports Blackberry, iPhone and iPod Touch
  • Supports Google Android, Opera mini and Palm Pre with some hacking
  • Settings for displaying categories, tags and author name in post listings
  • Settings for adding Google AdWords and Analytics
  • Customize the styling and colors and your logo (as an icon)
  • Support for other plugins

Here are some screen shots from an iPhone and from a Palm Pre:

IMG_0151

browser_page

If you’re familiar with editing PHP code and would like to enable WPtouch for Android, Palm Pre and Opera mini, please edit the wptouch.php, replace the array on line 250 with the following:

$useragents = array( “iPhone”,  “iPod”,  “aspen”,  “android”,  “dream”, “webos”, “incognito”,  “opera mini”, “webmate”,  “BlackBerry”);

Plugins Podcast Skill Level: Any

To learn more about the WPtouch plugin, please go to http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wptouch/.

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Plugins 021 – Interview Lorelle on WordPress Part 3

This episode we continue our interview with Lorelle, the host of Lorelle on WordPress. Lorelle on WordPress is a popular WordPress blog that covers WordPress, reporting on new and exciting happenings in the WordPress community including development, new features, plugins plus help, tips, advice, and blogging techniques.

In this segment we go into detail with a plugin I’ve developed but yet to release that creates static files for your blog feeds. Lorelle goes on to suggest the WP Super Cache plugin as well.

Lorelle goes into detail about how plugin developers can support their plugins. We both agree that the forum system currently in place at WordPress.org is lacking. I also mention that there are advantages when a business or company develops plugins vs. an individual. Lorelle hit a nail on the head with plugin support. It is important that plugin users first read the documentation before asking questions that have already been answered in the docs.

Lorelle asks me what tip I have for WordPress plugin developers. I recommend learning how to use the Subversion system to allow WordPress.org to host your plugin.

Lorelle will be touring other WordCamps scheduled throughout the world. If you’re hosting a WordPress event, please check out Lorelle’s WordPress event page.

Thank you so much Lorelle for coming onto the show and discussing WordPress and WordPress plugins!

Plugins 020 – Interview Lorelle on WordPress Part 2

This episode we continue our interview with Lorelle, the host of Lorelle on WordPress. Lorelle on WordPress is a popular WordPress blog that covers WordPress, reporting on new and exciting happenings in the WordPress community including development, new features, plugins plus help, tips, advice, and blogging techniques.

Lorelle continues our conversation listing some plugins she recommends. Archivist WordPress Plugin showcase older blog posts on the front page of your WordPress blog.

Lorelle and I agree that plugin developers need to write and maintain better readme.txt files to their plugins so the plugins can be easily found on searches.

We also talk about niche plugins for playing chess, tarot card reading, plugin to display playing cards, genealogy plugins (TNG) and more!

Part three will be available next week, stay tuned.

Plugins 018 – WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Today we’re covering the WP Greet Box WordPress plugin.

The WP Greet Box plugin adds a welcome box to the top of your blog post and/or pages based on where the visitor came from. The box can be extensively customized and special greetings can be added. The plugin is useful if you wish to help new users find additional content on your blog as well as encourage visitors to subscribe to your feed or tweet the blog post they are currently viewing.

Features include:

  • Extensive list of greetings for sites such as Google, Yahoo search, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc…
  • Ability to add custom greetings and greeting icons
  • Open links in greeting box in new browser windows option
  • Display related posts within your welcome boxes to help visitor find additional relevant content
  • Import/Export options
  • Extensive documentation to add greetings to your WordPress theme

Plugins Podcast Skill Level: Any

To learn more about the WP Greet Box plugin, please go to http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-greet-box/.

WordPress 2.8 Upgrade WYSIWYG TinyMCE Google Gears Bug

If you’ve recently upgraded to WordPress 2.8 and you’ve noticed that your friendly post editor (WYSIWYG by TinyMCE) no longer appears, you must likely have Google Gears enabled for your site. The Javascript error console includes a line number error and when viewing the script source, unreadable binary characters are present.

To fix, remove your site from the list of sites Google Gears is enabled. To do this from Firefox, click the “Tools” pull down menu and select “Gears Settings”. Click ‘remove’ for the sites listed that are having the problem.

From my research, I’ve discovered that Google Gears Caches files locally without regard to javascript errors, cleared browser cache or taking into account the query strings in the URLs.  It may be too complicated for Google Gears to detect javascript errors, but it should detect when the cache has been cleared in a browser in my opinion. More importantly, when the URL changes, e.g. from /wp-includes/js/tinymce/wp-tinymce.php?c=0&ver=3241-1141 to /wp-includes/js/tinymce/wp-tinymce.php?c=0&ver=3241-1141&change=1), Google Gears should treat this new URL link differently, as the query string may tell the server to send back a completely different code.Google Gears Developers: Please treat the URL including the query string as separate files to be cached in Google Gears.

The only way I could see WordPress developers from preventing this from happening in the future is to rename the wp-tinymce.php file for every release. There may be some documentation for Google Gears as well to tell it to upgrade all of the locally cached files.