Mobile Plugins for WordPress
I’m working on setting up a mobile edition of a WordPress site. The no frills approach would be to simply create a separate stylesheet for handheld devices, but I could probably spend days tweaking that. Surely a mobile plugin for WordPress would yield faster and more featured results.
WordPress Mobile Pack is a complete toolkit to help mobilize your WordPress site and blog. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get it working with WP Super Cache.
WordPress Mobile Edition is a plugin that shows an interface designed for a mobile device when visitors come to your site on a mobile device. Despite bundled support for WordPress Mobile Edition in WP Super Cache, I still had problems with compatibility: pages viewed on my Blackberry were getting cached and displayed to desk top users.
Wapple Architect for WordPress is a plugin that allows you to mobilize your blog in minutes. It has lots of great features that got me excited about using it. I requested a dev key but didn’t receive the automated email. However, after a couple of hours I was able to regenerate the dev key from the Wapple dashboard. With Wapple Architect and WP Super Cache both enabled though, I lost all caching. Apparently more cache support is on the way. Also, I learned through trial and error that Wapple Architect and Widon’t aren’t compatible.
WPtouch transforms your WordPress blog into an iPhone application-style theme, complete with ajax loading articles and effects, when viewed from an iPhone, iPod touch, Android or BlackBerry touch mobile device. The theme is quite beautiful, but I was turned off by the lack of native support for Blackberry Curve (and when I viewed the plugin author’s website on my Curve I got the desktop version.) At first, I couldn’t find any specific mention about whether or not WPtouch is compatible with WP Super Cache. Glancing through the forums though, I came across this video tutorial: Configuring WPtouch with WP Super Cache.
The WPtouch video provided me with two helpful tips that I used to enable WordPress Mobile Edition alongside WP Super Cache:
- Use WP Super Cache in Half On mode only;
- Add list of handheld devices to WP Super Cache’s list of Rejected User Agents.
I found this forum thread that suggests that WP Super Cache’s Rejected User Agent parsing is flawed, specifically when the user agent has a space in it. So, I used this list:
MMP
240x320
400X240
AvantGo
BlackBerry
Blazer
Cellphone
Danger
DoCoMo
EudoraWeb
Googlebot-Mobile
hiptop
IEMobile
MIDP-2
MMEF20
MOT-V
NetFront
Newt
Nitro
Nokia
Palm
portalmmm
Proxinet
ProxiNet
SHARP-TQ-GX10
SHG-i900
Small
SonyEricsson
SymbianOS
TS21i-10
UP.Browser
UP.Link
webOS
WinWAP
iPhone
iPod
Android
BlackBerry9530
webOS
Nokia5800
I’d prefer to use the Super Cache mode, but at least this gives me a mobile edition plus caching for desktop users.
Unfortunately, I ran a test of my new mobile edition over at ready.mobi and scored a miserable 2/Bad! Apparently I have more work to do to provide a decent mobile experience.
