Wordpress Mobile With Style
I’ve been fooling around with the mobile version of this blog. It all started out with getting the home page to display the most recent post instead of the recent post list and just kinda spiraled out of control. I’ve put my version up: wp-mobile-style.zip, for those who might be interested. Stuff I was playing around with besides getting it to look like more than text:
- Lifted a bunch of stuff from the GAP recommendations and templates to make things a little less ugly
- Added back in the ?mobilenow hack I’ve been playing with to be able to validate things when doing adaptation
- Validates as XHTML Mobile
- Almost best practices, I needed to change the content format for the dotMobi ready report
- Got a 5 out of 5 on the MobileReady report
Still seems like it’s impossible to come up with a single page that passes all the tests and recommendation checks from the different areas. Would be great if that weren’t the case.
Update:
I’ve stopped using the direct mobile version plugin on this blog and started using the Mowser Wordpress Mobile version instead. The Mowser version has the added benefit of mobilizing all outbound links as well.
February 22nd, 2007 at 12:54 am
We hear you… ;-)
February 22nd, 2007 at 7:30 am
Indeed, that’s what we want to achieve as well.
For what it’s worth, we have started a mailing list where the mobiReady reports guys, myself (for the BP checker) and other interested parties are discussing developing a common checking library to avoid this kind of discrepancies across implementations (having as a basis the tests defined in mobileOK basic):
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-mobileok-checker/
February 26th, 2007 at 6:16 am
Awesome plugin! I just started using it at http://www.developing.mobi.
I was initially getting a fail on “structure” so I simply changed the first h3 header to an h2 header (on the index.php page) so this way they are in order and now it passes and my site gets a 5.00 score.
Thanks a lot!!
February 26th, 2007 at 2:14 pm
Hi. What exactly does that ?mobilenow hack do? I noticed that if I use firefox and type the site url with /?mobilenow at the end the browser will show the mobile version of the site. Is that hack needed for the plugin to function as you have it? Can i block that off from search engine spiders? Thanks.
February 26th, 2007 at 6:01 pm
The plugin normally uses browser detection based on the user agent to figure out if it should display the mobile templates or the normal template. I added the ?mobilenow parameter to force the mobile version without having to change the headers sent by my browser. Spiders and bots should get the same version they did before.
February 27th, 2007 at 3:09 am
Ok, thanks again.
February 27th, 2007 at 5:32 am
[...] trying out a new dotmobi wordpress plugin on this blog. The plugin was created by Mike Rowehl of ThisIsMobility.com. Mike is the senior architect at (use PC for links) http://www.admob.com, a mobile ad network. [...]
June 3rd, 2007 at 4:02 am
[...] all that we’re just at the start though. The very very very start. We can’t even get online validators to agree what is and is not valid mobile markup. And yet we think we can leapfrog to where the web is in terms of using the browser as a base [...]
September 18th, 2007 at 8:05 am
[...] Tech bloggerMike Rowehl posts his experience about tweaking his WordPress blog for mobile access. [...]
December 13th, 2007 at 3:04 am
[...] site ID without having to go in and poke at the code. I was considering going back and updating the Wordpress Mobile with Style version that I had as well, but there are some other mobile WordPress plugins floating around [...]
August 11th, 2009 at 8:59 am
Hi,
Just wondering if you’re still using a mobile plugin? I’ve tried hitting your blog from my handset and I got the web version!
If you fancy giving another one a go, I’ve written a mobile plugin for wordpress - the homepage is here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wapple-architect/ - it’d be great to hear what you think.
And before you ask - it doesn’t score that well on ready.mobi.
However, in the plugins defence, it fails because of a number of reasons that the ready.mobi just can’t handle. For example, the recommendation is not to have images > 200px. But what happens if I know that a handset is 320px wide, or 300px - my plugin resizes images dynamically on the fly so they will always fit. This is a failure on the ready.mobi test and not my plugin.
A number of other fails on the ready.mobi test also refer to things that have been dynamically output to a phone. External resources? What about if the phone can handle external resources and cache the result (so therefore faster)? Well they get external resources but phones that don’t want external resources don’t get them. Again, a big fail on the part of ready.mobi and not me.
The key here is that the output my plugin produces is dynamic to every single device - not a one-size-fits-all that will satisfy the ready.mobi test.
If anything, my plugin should mean that the test gets updated so that the results that are being produced (which are better), get verified and tested by an up-to-date validator.
Like I said - if you want to try out my plugin, feel free to get in touch via http://mobilewebjunkie.com - i’d be only too happy to talk you though it!