iPhone Control Panel WordPress Plugin

I am proud to announce my second WordPress plugin. (Yes, I know this is only a couple days after releasing my  first plugin, but I told you I had a surge of inspiration lately, didn’t I?) This one is called “iPhone Control Panel” and it gives WordPress users an admin panel where they can control how iPhones and iPod Touches “see” their website. You can choose an icon that will be used when users add a bookmark to their home screen. You can create custom css that only affects touch devices. You can control the viewport, and you can even redirect iPhones and iPod touches to a different url. Click the thumbnail on the right to see the plugin’s control panel. Here is a little more info on what you can control with the plugin:

Bookmark icon

The bookmark icon dropdown menu above lets you choose the icon that appears on a users home screen when they bookmark your site. When you click “save changes” you will be able to preview your new icon on the phone in the Plugin screen. If you want to us a custom icon of your own design, simply replace one of the six images in the “icon” folder of this plugin.

CSS

You can enter custom css that will only be seen by iPhone and iPod Touches. Keep in mind that the phone will also see your other stylesheets, so you need to redefine your styles here in order to “overwrite” them.

Viewport

Think of the viewport as the size of the window that is seen on the iPhone’s screen. The width of the screen of the touch devices is 320 pixels when held vertically and 480 pixels when held horizontally. The optimum viewport for your site will vary so experiment with it until you get it right.

Redirect

If you would like to redirect iPhone and iPod Touch devices to another url, enter it in the “redirect” box. Other browsers are not affected by this redirect, just touch devices. This will add a redirect code to every page of your site, so use it carefully. Leaving this box blank and no redirect will occur.

Installation Instructions
Installing iPhone Control Panel is very easy and does not require any template modification. Just follow these steps:

1. Upload the folder ‘/iPhone_Control_Panelr/’ to the ‘/wp-content/plugins/’ directory.

2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress.

3. Click on “settings” and you should see a iPhone Control Panel link. Click this and follow the directions to customize your iPhone settings.

The plugin is a free download and is available through WordPress plugin directory.

Version 0.6 was a major rebuild, and some people may be interested in accessing the previous version.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 30th, 2008 at 8:38 am and is filed under Inventions/Creations, Wordpress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.