I’ve been experimenting with mobile plugins for WordPress. Mobilepress gave me some white-screen-of-death problems. Then I found Wptouch. It works, and so far I love the layout. If you’re browsing this site on a mobile device like an Android phone or an Iphone my site will recognize this and revert from my standard theme to the Wptouch mobile theme. If you would prefer to view the site with my standard theme, then scroll to the bottom, and you’ll see a button that allows you to turn off the mobile theme. Readers who access the site from a standard web browser won’t notice any changes.
So far, I love it. I have two complaints, but they are relatively minor. First, there is no option to make pages links show up on the front page. So if I wanted people who stumbled on my site from an Iphone to realize that I have a podcast, journal surveys, and other philosophy resources – it would not be obvious to them. There is a scroll down menu, but it’s nice and unassuming (i.e. easy to miss).
My other complaint is that the height of some of the Google Forms on the journal surveys is reduced. You can still fill out a survey form, but the results spreadsheets are condensed.
Other than that, I love the plugin. I think the overall benefits for mobile readers outweigh those two costs – so I’m going to keep it in place for awhile.
I’d appreciate any feedback from readers on the mobile theme.
Aside: This plugin is going to be great for the installs of WordPress that I’m using for course management. It will give students, who do use smart phones a lot, a better way to access the course website.
Very cool! I haven’t looked all over the site on my iPhone, but it’s looking good so far.
Thanks for testing it out. You know, this might be a good plugin to play around with if you wanted to optimize IEP for mobile devices.
It’s very simple to implement, and it can be customized pretty easily.
It would be pretty awesome (I think) if IEP rendered in a mobile friendly way when people browsed to it on their Iphones and Android phones.
Yeah, I messed around with some mobile plug-ins awhile back. The major issues with that are making it run well with our caching system and with controlling how it looks. We have some major CSS manipulation to forformatting the main text, headings, bibliographies, tables, tables of contents, etc. And the caching is important since we’re running on a very slow server that has resources tapped by other sites on it too.
I just fiddled with WPtouch a bit, and it seems really cool. But it really seemed to bog down the site. It ends up running much faster on the non-mobile version (at least on my iPhone)! I’m hoping to get some mobile version running someday, though… someday. 🙂
This looks impressive, mobile-y — I’m posting this from a Droid. I will look more at how you’re using it for course management.