A while back, when I got my new work mobile, I checked out my blog using the WAP browser. The blog was visible, but as it was faithfully reproduced, it meant that I had to scroll all over the place to see it. This was obviously not the best approach for mobile users.

I’ve had a look around at WordPress plugins and tried out two, WordPress Mobile Edition by Alex King and WordPress Mobile by Andy Moore. I used the demo of Opera Mini to assist me in my testing.

WordPress Mobile

The installation was a straight forward copy the file to the wordpress plugin folder and activate the plugin. Then under settings you can adjust some of the options including the predefined colour schemes. I chose blue to match with the general theme of my sites. The plugin has the functionality to add Admob Mobile Advertising and Google AdSense for Mobile adverts to the top and bottom of the pages, or at least it would have if the functions needed to make this work were enabled on my hosting.

It provided a clean rendering of the content of my site, by eliminating the sidebar contents and theme images. I did have problems with some errors at the top of the post pages:

Warning: imagesx(): supplied argument is not a valid Image resource in /homepages/…./wp-content/plugins/wordpress-mobile.php on line 1869

Warning: imagesy(): supplied argument is not a valid Image resource in /homepages/…./wp-content/plugins/wordpress-mobile.php on line 1870

Warning: cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at /homepages/…./wp-content/plugins/wordpress-mobile.php:1869) in /homepages/…./wp-content/plugins/wordpress-mobile.php on line 606

If you ignored the errors, the rest of the page loaded fine. Any comments on posts were shown on a separate link.

WordPress Mobile Edition

The installation caught me out, I should have read the readme file. You have to copy the file to the wordpress plugin folder and the wp-mobile folder to the themes folder, then activate the plugin. There are no settings to adjust, it just works.

Again, it also produce a clean, uncluttered version of my site by eliminating the same things. One thing I did like was that it included the comments to post on the same page and also displayed the Firestats extras (country, operating system and browser images) with the comment.

While I’m sure the issue with the errors on the post pages could have been resolved in the WordPress Mobile plugin, I don’t think it offered anything to me over the WordPress Mobile Edition one from Alex King. While checking out Alex King‘s site, I realised I was already using another of his plugins, Twitter Tools.