By nickel

Are you interested in producing a mobile version of your WordPress website? I recently got a Treo smartphone and, after a bit of painful surfing to some of my favorite sites, I got motivated to create mobile versions of both FiveCentNickel and Raising4Boys.

As it turns out, there are several plugins available for serving mobile versions of your WordPress website. Unfortunately, at least one of them warns users that the plugin might inadvertently deliver mobile content to search engine spiders, thereby jeopardizing your search engine rankings. Not good.

So which one did I end up using? After a bit of reading, I decided to go with Andy Moore’s WordPress Mobile. Installation was easy - simply drop a single file in your plugins folder and activate it from within the WordPress dashboard. Then hop on over to the WordPress Mobile to configure it…

The biggest gotcha is that if you’re running wp-cache, you might end up serving the wrong version to your visitors. Fortuantely, there’s a workaround - just turn off the “One Web” setting in WordPress Mobile and then add ‘&mobi‘ and ‘?mobi‘ to the list of rejected URIs in the wp-cache control panel.

The end result is quite impressive. The plugin auto-detects smartphones and magically serves the appropriate version without making readers go to a special URL. What they get is a stripped down version of the site that’s easy to read and can still handle comments, both in terms of displaying existing comments and publishing new ones. Graphics are automatically resized to fit, and the css is totally customizable. Thus, I was able to make the mobile versions of both sites resemble their full-blown counterparts. And if you’re interested in monetizing the mobile version of your site (I didn’t bother), there’s even built-in support for AdMob.

Finally, WordPress Mobile includes support for publishing (and uploading) on the go. I haven’t actually tried out these features yet, but I’m looking forward to giving it a go at some point in the future.

Note that I have run into a couple of formatting glitches when I try to preview the mobile versions using a ‘regular’ web browser on my computer. The main problem seems to be that pages with certain special characters fail to render when viewed in Firefox or Safari (and possibly other browsers). Nonetheless, all pages have rendered perfectly on my Treo 755p. Hopefully the same is true of other smartphones.

As for the issue of serving the wrong content to search engine bots, I spoofed the Googlebot user-agent using User Agent Switcher in Firefox and it worked just as expected… The full-blown version was served up just as it should have been.

All in all, this was very easy to implement, and provides a huge service to your readers that might want to read your site on the go.

(By the way, we haven’t gotten around to making this site mobile-compatible.)

Update: Ugh. False start. After testing this out yesterday, I awoke today to find that it’s serving the full version to my Treo. I suspect that this has something to do with wp-cache. Apparently the above tweaks aren’t enough… While the plugin is definitely producing a mobile-compatible version of this site, it’s not consistently delivering it. Stay tuned.