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!
I’ve been raving about this all over the place so I won’t repeat myself …
Oh, what the hell … WELL DONE!!!!! I love it.
I just have one quick, teeny thing – the readme.txt file ain’t purty
(XP – don’t shoot!)
Nope, but is it in the official Wordpress.org format. See, when WP displays info for a plugin, it pulls it out of the readme.txt, which needs to be structured that way.
Thanks for the comments!
Hah! I understand.
Hmmm … I was trying to read that for all the nitty gritt and it wasn’t easy. Perhaps you should consider a documentation.txt file?
Indeed – we will get the documantation all sorted out in the next few days – howtos, etc. We’re boys – this sort of thing doesn’t come as a big priority
Hehehe
Cool …
You plugin just rocks
I dont have an iphone or mobile device how can I test how the page looks on a mobile device?
Cheers
Michael:
Append ?mobile to your url. Should do the trick.
Ah I found it here. All I had to do was add a “?mobile” to the URL. Maybe you should write that somewhere in the ReadMe.
Thanks for a cool plugin.
MP is great! I installed it, in fact it was first plugin that I’ve installed through the wordpress 2.7 automated installation interface. Nice to try it out and see that it really helps with life.
What about the main page navigation menus? I had for example the list of articles in the main page. Now there’s no navigation; the search box is included in the mobile version. Is this hand customizable or selectable as options somewhere?
Good job with MobilePress!!
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I keep getting HTTP error 403 when browsing with my mobile. It suddenly started putting this error message. Previously the site looked fine.. hmm?
I got to know about this plugin few days back and I installed it on my blog. The plugin works great. Though the downside is due to adsense or any advertisement code , it make your blog look ugly in mobile. If you are not using any adsense code around your blog posts. This plugin will be very handy to get an extra edge from mobile internet users.
I am very pleased with this plugin. After adding in the functions for a category menu and hard coding some page links it is highly functional to my mobile audience. My question for you is if there is a way to create a custom landing destination for mobile devices?
E.G.–> I go to the site on my blackberry or iphone and instead of landing on the homepage, it drops me at http://www.mydomain.com/mobile.html. Is this something that would be hard to change in the code? If not, in which php file would I change it in?
Thanks
No matter how easy you make it for a reader to leave feedback, they still have to take some time to do it, and to show how much they care – what’s a few moments to respond to them and thank them for doing so?