Just a quick post to let you know about a handy WordPress plugin that will quickly and easily make your blog posts accessible to all those iPhone users out there.
It’s called WPtouch and it was suggested to me by friend, Composer, and iPhone user Jonathan Scary.
Here’s a link directly to the WordPress Plugin site where you can download and install manually, if you’d like. If you’ve upgraded your WordPress installation to v2.7 (highly recommended!) you can click one button in your Plugins Dashboard and it will download and install the plugin automatically.
Couldn’t be easier, and it just works. You can change the colors and look and feel of the interface and icons that will be shown on the iPhone for your blog, but I left everything at the defaults and am happy with the results.
Here’s what DigitalDoyle, The Blog looks like on the iPhone:
Let all the cool people see your stuff! Give WPtouch a try.
Thanks Jonathan, for the plugin suggestion and the testing!
Update: 5:37pm
Blog pages via WPtouch on iPhone…
In the comments Amy asked how blog pages showed up on the iPhone via WPtouch.
You have to activate the option to show your blog’s pages in the plugin’s admin panel, but it’s a piece of cake. Here, via the ever helpful Jonathan, is what the About DigitalDoyle page looks like on the iPhone:
Thanks again for the screengrabs, Jonathan!
Awesome– thanks for the info! Might as well install it on all blogs we do from now on! How does it show pages (as opposed to posts), by the way? Do you access that under the “menu” link at the upper right?
Amy,
Yep! I think it would be a good idea.
To be honest, I’m not sure, although I would imagine that it reformats them similarly to the way it does the posts.
I’ll ask Jonathan if he wouldn’t mind doing a screenshot of the About DigitalDoyle page and sending it to me, and I’ll update this post so you can see it.
Still need to figure out how it will handle things like Flash animations and videos. Not sure the iPhone is Flash-capable yet (which is insane if it’s not). I know it will do videos, but not sure what format they need to be in.
Hmmm… but since the FlashPlayer can play mp4 files, and I’m pretty sure that’s a format that the iPhone can play, maybe the videos could be pulled in via the WPtouch accessing the same mp4 files as the FlashPlayer. If not, I think I’ll ask the WPtouch developers if that feature is doable.
It would greatly simplify things if the iPhone could just play Flash videos, though.
Unfortunately iPhone doesn’t support Flash (which IS insane!) but the WPTouch plugin really does do a great job of formating pages (even if Apple don’t seem to be getting on too well with Adobe right now.
Other plugins I’d strongly recommend for WordPress include TwitMe (which as the name implies, adds your recent Tweets to your blog) and SEO Smart Links which provides automatic SEO benefits for your site (creates automatic links from keywords i.e. if you’re using search engine friendly page names as you are, then whenever you type words which appear in your URLs, e.g. “apple macintosh” SEO Smart Links will create a link automatically to any page you’ve created with the name apple-macintosh. Nifty!
The other plugin I love is NexGen Gallery – an awesome AJAX (I hate that term) photo gallery plugin which makes cataloguing (how do you spell that word?) and displaying photos and absolute breeze.
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One other thing: the iPhone does support H.264. Check out Leo Laporte’s last but one MacBreak Weekly – http://twit.tv/mbw124 – the guys talk a little about streaming video to the iPhone and some way of getting around the Flash “wrapper” (beats me!).
Very cool! Looks like a really useful tool, considering the proliferation of iPhones. Great find!
Thanks for the info and links, Jonathan! I’ll look into all of that.
I’m currently using All in One SEO. I think I downloaded it in an earlier version of WP, but haven’t really used it. I haven’t done enough research on all that yet. I’ll be sure to read up on SEO Smart Links.
I appreciate the tips, Jonathan!
The best information i have found exactly here. Keep going Thank you
The article is usefull for me. I’ll be coming back to your blog.
How soon will you update your blog? I’m interested in reading some more information on this issue.