Remco Bressers’ Blog

As a followup on my blog post WordPressmobile.mobi is Spyware i’m now going to review the Wapple Architect plugin for WordPress. The original developer (Rich Gubby) replied about this plugin on my previous blog post and asked me to review the plugin.

Here we go…

I looked through the documentation which tells me i have to open an account at wapple.net, which happens to be owned by the creator of the plugin. On the Wapple page, it then generates an “Architect Dev Key” which you need for the configuration of the plugin. This key is bound to your domainname, which i think is rather restrictive. A blog can have multiple domainnames.
After filling the key, the rest is all self explanatory and stupid simple. It just works.

Alright.. let’s test it out. On my Nokia E71, the layout looks rather simple to me but there’s plenty of possibilities to enhance this. I did notice some strange timeout issues on blog items which i didn’t have before installing the plugin. I don’t know for sure, but it looks like it has something to do with a very short timeout somewhere in the process. As far as i looked into the code, it creates a cookie on your device for 3600 seconds. Within that time, there will be no calls to Wapple made. This means the connection to Wapple is OK because it does build the first page all the time.

On the iPhone, i’m having similar issues.

The default layout looks far better on the iPhone (as all things look better on an iPhone ), but on the iPhone i’m having similar timeout issues which happens after only a few seconds of waiting time.

Maybe the developer can look into this.

The next problem i’m having on the iPhone is the page rendering. It renders almost perfectly on many different platforms, but on the iPhone the content is too wide for the screen, which means it doesn’t do a very good job on detecting the edge of the screen.

Looking into the code

Well, the last time i looked into the code of a mobile WordPress plugin, i was shocked by ads and callback code which was hacked into it. I was pleased to see that this plugin was free of any ad code or any callback options you don’t want. There’s one big ‘but’ in this one, because it does call home to verify the API key and to detect what type of mobile device it is. Ofcourse you’re well aware of that before you install the plugin, but this could be used by the author to influence your blog and get a hold on your personal data (you filled it in yourself on Wapple.net). It’s not disturbing though. You are well aware of the fact that you’re registering for an API key to use on your own blog, so you know the author has your information just as Google has everytime i seek something on the net. The code for the plugin looks very tidy and you can see it’s written by someone who wants you to know how the stuff works. That’s very nice and i wish every developer works like this.

The pros:

• Clean code. No phone-home or hidden ads or any other crap
• Install, get the key, fill it in and it works. It’s that simple
• Easy configuration and pretty customisable

The cons:

• Use of multiple domains would be nice as you can only get one key per WordPress installation
• Rendering on the iPhone is far from ideal, but this doesn’t seem to be such a big bug to me
• Use of your own ads (Google Adsense) is still impossible. This would be a killing app for me for this plugin

Overall, i’m pretty pleased with this plugin and i started using it today. Thanks Rich!

You can get the plugin at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wapple-architect