WP7 Mobile Friendly WordPress Site
If you're running a WordPress site you owe it to yourself to check out WPTouch. WPTouch is a fabulous plug-in for WordPress that instantly transforms your site into a navigatable mobile friendly one.
Browse to a WordPress site and it's pretty clean. Here's my site using the default Twenty Ten theme in my Windows Phone 7 IE browser:
That's pretty good. In fact, comparing it to the site in the browser it's identical. However navigating tiny links on the site or menus can be tedius with fat fingers. Sure, mobile devices offer pinch zoom and features like that but do you really want to be constantly zooming in, panning around, and zooming back out to read content?
Andrew Woodward over at 21apps turned me onto a WordPress plugin called WPTouch this weekend so I thought I would give it a go. I have a few sites I run on WordPress and I wanted to see what it could do. Wow. What a transformation. Once you install and activate the WPTouch plugin (all from the comfort of your WordPress dashboard) your site will magically be transformed into this:
My WordPress site looks like an iPhone app! No software to install on the client, this is all magically done behind the scenes by detecting the browser and serving up an alternate theme via the plug-in.
To get it working for WP7 I had to add a quick modification to the settings. Once you're installed WPTouch and activated it (just add it through the built-in search in the WordPress dashboard, it's the first one to come up) then go to Settings > WPTouch. Scroll down to Advanced Options. There you'll see a list of currently enabled user-agents so the list is pretty full; Android, BlackBerry, iPhone, etc.
What's missing is the user agent to detect the Windows Phone 7.
Just add "iemobile" which is the lowest common denominator to the Custom user-agents box and save the settings. Visit your site with your WP7 phone and voila, everything will be right as rain.
Don't worry about navigation as it's covered by a clever menu that's created by the plugin so you'll have access to tags, categories and any part of the site:
The rest of the site looks awesome and your browser users will still continue to see the site with whatever theme you have applied. It's not perfect on WP7 as the theme is designed for iPhones but IMHO it's a far better experience than trying to tap on tiny links in a browser. Everything is big and bold, the way it should be on a mobile device.
Finally, if you do decide to add the plugin (it's free, although there is a Pro version too) then show your WPTouch pride to your desktop browser users with a decal. The guys ask you link back to the site if you do. You grab whatever size and format image you want from here.
Hope that helps and here's to a better mobile experience from your WordPress site!
P.S. The "boys" and I were discussing something like this for SharePoint. Yeah, it would be totally awesome if we had something like this which would serve up say a Metro view for WP7 phones. Not sure if it'll become a reality but food for thought.