Today we’re happy to announce Piggy™, a new premium WordPress plugin which adds mobile web-app access to your WP E-Commerce, WooCommerce, Shopp or Cart66 sales information.

Piggy puts real-time sales data from WP E-Commerce, WooCommerce, Shopp or Cart66 in your pocket.

iOS and Android

Piggy works and looks great on iOS and Android devices. Its gorgeous, sharp interface also fully supports the iPhone 4′s rich retina display.

Clutter-free, Clean Layout

Simple and elegant, Piggy reveals the sales statistics you care about in its streamlined, easy to use layout.

View sales information for today, this week, this month or year— compare data, average sales and units sold, plus view the top selling products in your shop, and more.

Piggy Predicts The Future

Using complex forecasting, Piggy also makes accurate sales predictions for the day, week, month and year ahead, and provides forecasting for product sales, too.

See how new products added in your store affect your bottom line— gauge how new prices change your outlook— it’s all at your fingertips, in a glance, with Piggy.

Always Fresh

Piggy smartly checks and automatically refreshes when new sales come in, so you always have the most up-to-data at your fingertips.

Push Notifications

And it works with iOS apps like Prowl and Howl to deliver real-time, instant push notifications of new sales to your iOS device. Configure as many devices as you wish to receive these updates.

Knowing your sales numbers is vitally important for your business— with Piggy you can have them in your pocket.

Availability & Compatibility

Piggy works with WP E-Commerce, WooCommerce, Shopp or Cart66.

A support and upgrades license for Piggy costs just $25.00 (CAD).

Piggy™ is on sale now!

This plugin that allows you to show support for the Earth Hour event and “turn off” your website’s lights during the hour. It’s an easy way to show your support for Earth Hour, and raise awareness of the worldwide event.

Before the event your site will show a thin banner which counts down to the event, shows how many other sites are using the plugin, and also links to the official Earth Hour website.

During the event, your website shows a “blackout” screen, with an earth hour logo (or you can display your own) and your own personalized message and earth hour image letting visitors know your website is participating in the event.

You can find out more about the plugin on the Official WordPress plugin repository, or add the plugin through your WordPress admin by visiting the plugins/add new page, and searching for “Earth Hour”.

What Does It Do?

The Earth Hour plugin will add a small fixed banner across the top of your site (we’re running it here on BraveNewCode) that provides a link to the Earth Hour website, counts all the sites using the plugin and participating in the event, and also provides a link for others to visit our site and learn about/download the plugin themselves for their own WordPress sites.

It will also automatically determine your timezone for Earth Hour, Saturday March 28th at 8:30pm local time, and ‘switch off’ your website, instead showing a page showing your solidarity of support for the hour, and then ‘switch on’ your site afterwards.

You can view screenshots on the earth hour plugin page, along with version details and the reasons behind our creating the plugin.

The plugin is free to all, released under the GPU General Public License.

WPtouch 1.3

Duane and I have been hard at work, squeezing in every spare moment we’ve got to get a substantial update to WPtouch finished. We’re hoping to pack a bunch of additions, fixes and enhancements. Here’s some of the list of changes thus far…

• Switch from Prototype to the more WordPress-native jQuery for javascript
  (faster, more current, and will set us up for future enhancements planned)
• Addition of style options (choose fonts for post titles and content, change font sizes for both)
• Fix for /blog/ re-direct happening unintentionally if you use a different page for your home page then the default WordPress configuration
• Elimination of unneeded images, javascript
• More template file cleanups, the addition of far more comments in the code to help you make custom modifications
• Enable comments on selected pages
• Option to manually enter in a new blog title (fixes cases where the blog title runs the length of the header and wraps)
• Option to hide/show excerpts by default

We expect the release to be coming out in the next few days. If you’re experiencing problems with your WPtouch installation, please wait for the update and apply it before requesting support- it may just fix your issue : )

If you haven’t come across it, but have considered blogging from your iPhone or iPod touch if it weren’t for the slow, bloaty WordPress admin- I just made your day (actually WPhone will, but I digress).

I wrote this post using its slick admin, and its post limitations are really Apple’s devices’ limits (no cut and paste, no image upload).

There seems to be one bug where editing a post means re-typing the title each time, but I may be overlooking something in that regard.

Check it out.

OVERWEIGHT AND BLOATED?

Having taken the broadband world for granted, we wanted to include some Ajax functions and Scriptaculous-based effects naturally, to add ‘ohh and awe’ to the theme. Though Scriptaculous (being built on the 90k Prototype) is heavy duty when it comes to mobile Safari’s capability to swallow it, and it soon proved to be a major blockade to developing the theme in the ways we had imagined.

I don’t have real-world stats for the comparison on hand as I write this, but our testing revealed that we’d have to explore other options to accomplish a lighter bandwidth footprint and still have the features we wanted, because it was disastrously slow.

Our preference was to use Scriptaculous, mostly because we were both familiar with it, and had a library of prepared code to draw up to speed up the development cycle. In short- we were lazy and looking for a quick fix to the predicament.

Enter compression. Now, I don’t claim to be an authority on this matter, as are there who need to take advantage of compression for mission critical application use, but I do know that when it comes to the raw transfer time of compressed vs. uncompressed scripts that every kilobyte makes an enormous difference, especially when we’re talking EDGE on the iPhone.

SQUEEZING INTO THESE PANTS

The combined weight of the javascript effects on WPtouch is a staggering 48kb. Consider that Prototype, Scriptaculous (Effects only) and some custom iPhone/iPod touch specific code is contained in that tiny package. Uncompressed, it was over 170kb. That savings (nearly 4 times smaller) changed the page load times dramatically, and allowed us to go forward with our Prototype/Scriptaculous plans.

STYLE FIRST

We used CSS wherever possible to provide colours and shapes, and if it weren’t for the fact that mobile Safari doesn’t support its big brother’s capability for CSS transforms, we would have been able to skip out on Scriptaculous for effects and just transform everything using CSS only.

A PICTURE IS WORTH A THOUSAND BYTES

The same was true for images. Whenever I could, I used the smallest possible sizes for files using a combination of very tiny crops for repeating images, and the ‘Save for web’ option in Photoshop.

I could have saved likely 50% more in file size if I had chosen .jpg as the predominant file type, but I really loved the quality that .png images provided. Early testing showed the difference in load times with .jpgs was nominal compared to the washouts I was seeing in colour with them.

MORE WEIGHT TO LOSE

We continue to trim and squeeze more weight out of WPtouch, and as we move towards adding new features it will certainly be something that will remain a constant challenge. With the advent of theme-capability for the plugin, we imagine that users themselves will come up with some dazzling examples of optimization- something we’re looking forward to seeing. In the mean time we’ll be focused on improving the theme as it is, and dabbling with Mootools and jQuery in compressed forms, along with other scripts available on the web for performing the functions we need will be explored.

What’s your experience with compression and file-size trimming? Have you got tricks we (and our readers) would love to know about?

We’ve got some aggressive plans to move WPtouch into unheard-of realms for the WP community, as well as other projects that will tie into it, but be cool all on their own. The one roadmap we can talk about is WPtouch, being that it’s a GPL project.

WHO SAID LOOKS AREN’T EVERYTHING?

WPtouch’s design was meant to mimic an Apple-like application look, and function in similar ways. The easy logic there was that it would be a cool achievement to totally transform a blog/website into looking like an app, and functioning like one where possible. With the use of Ajax in certain places alongside some Scriptaculous effects, I think we archived it for the most part.

But there quickly became the reality that even though we’d built custom, flexible style into the theme, it would be awesome if users were able to come up with their own themes for it, as well (plus we have notions of coming up with more official themes as well).

CAN WE SAY THEMING FOR THE WIN?

Themes made by users, easily selectable in the admin, with the possibility of us hosting them here on the site, in an easily user upload/download way. So that’s what we’ll be working on going forward with WPtouch, as well as a few other tweaks and changes to shore up the 1.0 line.

Media burner automatically extracts media files (MP3, FLV, YouTube, etc) from your blog posts and creates a site-wide player.

An example in action

Head on over to the downloadables page for more information or if you want to download it.

The standard WordPress plugin database just fell over, so I have no way to tell the world about this. So if you check the plugin out and like it, please forward the link around or do a blog post about it.

Head on over to the Media Burner Plugin page for more information on installation and use.