Today marks the release of a little project we’ve been working on for the WordPress community.
Basically, what MobilePress does is take your current WordPress blog and re-renders it when being viewed from a mobile device in more mobile-friendly way. So, instead of hoping that your (user’s) phone’s browser is smart enough to display a site that was meant for a 1024×768 display on a 320×240 mobile display, you can now make sure it renders the way you want it to.
This is done as follows:
- Detect if the site is being accessed from a mobile device
- If so, the plugin kicks in and determines which device is being used
- We then ‘hijack’ WordPress’s rendering, and switch to an alternate theme (one designed just for a mobile device)
- Control is returned to WordPress, so that the rest of your site/plugins get to run, as per normal.
There are a few other cool things happening here. If you design WordPress themes, you can now design a mobile theme that matches, and not have to worry about mobile domains and custom routing. Just activate the plugin and it takes care of the rest.
In addition to ‘generic’ mobile devices, we’ve provided the ability to specify custom themes for the iPhone, Opera Mini & Windows CE. This allows for a tiered approach, allowing the designer to take advantage of a device’s capabilities, and still have a failsafe for simpler devices.
Some have pointed out that there are already plugins to render your site for mobile. This is true. Why did we choose to write our own? Well, for one, the existing plugins just didn’t cut it.
The ‘WordPress Mobile’ plugin does not pass control back to WordPress, and uses a custom, hardcoded theme. In other words, you need to hack php to customise it. In addition to that, the author has a bunch of sneaky ads and backlinks all over the place which will render on your blog. Want to get rid of the ads? You’ll have to pay for that privilege.
WPTouch gets closer, but is geared only to the iPhone, and has a lot of hard coded elements in the code. Also not quite up to the standards WordPress advocates.
MobilePress aims to provide standards-based flexibility to the designer, with no financial implications for the user.
Hope you guys find this useful. Go check out the official MobilePress site or grab your copy directly from the WordPress repository, here.
PS: Any feedback and comment are appreciated – we will use them to improve the next release!