A while back I had read about several WordPress plugins that offered the ability to customize the viewing of your site for mobile devices. Yesterday I decided to go research the slew of plugins available out there to determine which one to implement. I reduced the field to 2 plugins. The MobilePress plugin and the WP Touch plugin. I liked the straightforward and simple approach offered by MobilePress, but then after playing with WP Touch, I decided that I like the larger number of options and ways to customize the features.

There are many options available for WP Touch WordPress plugin that make it a great one to offer a clean mobile version for your website. This plugin was designed specifically for iPhone, iPod Touch and Android devices although it appears other mobile devices are supported. I’m not sure how the site renders on other devices so perhaps you can leave a comment if you try it to let me know. Once enabled, the display of the site on an iPhone looks really clean and offered some nice features. One of those which I really liked was the ability to offer a custom icon which is placed next to the title and can be displayed on your home screen as well for an iPhone or iPod Touch. They provide a link to a great iPhone icon generator which I used to create one for Lifestream Blog. You also have the ability to add more custom icons or choose from a slew of existing ones they provide for each of your sites’ pages that you choose to make available in the navigation.

Also regarding the icon functionality, you can choose which pages you want to make visible in a nice custom dropdown menu available just to the right of the title. You can also offer an RSS feed and link to the email address you setup on the WordPress admin. The posts have several fields you can choose to display and offer a nice ajax dropdown for each of them that displays an excerpt with a link to view the full post.

One thing you need to make sure is that you follow the steps to properly configure WP Cache or WP Super Cache if you are running either of these plugins so that you’re site works properly. I was running WP Cache and had issues and then finally moved over to WP Super Cache which seems to offer better support for mobile devices.

Here’s screenshots showing the extensive settings available

Here’s a video showing some features on Lifestream Blog on my iPhone

Here’s a list of the notable features listed from the plugin page

• User-selected theme toggle (between WPtouch view and your site’s regular look)
• iPhone-like application appearance, functions
• AJAX, jQuery & effects in only 56kb
• The ability to turn advanced javascript effects & ajax on/off
• Full WordPress search, pages, archives, categories, tags and links support
• Theme native social bookmarking support
• iPhone/iPod touch native post e-mailing support
• Ajax comments, posted in real time
• Ajaxed pagination (users can browse posts like YouTube videos)
• Admin selectable custom icons for pages, logo, bookmark icon
• Manually edit your site’s title to fit WPtouch
• Show / Hide post excerpts, customize style in different ways
• Easily add your own icons to customize menu appearance
• Admin inclusion/exclusion of site pages shown in the theme’s menu
• Compatibility suite in admin to inform of add-ons, WordPress version support
• Favicon fetch & conversion to .png for links displayed using the WP blogroll
• Support for FlickrRSS plugin, Blip.it video plugin
• Automatic Archives page layout (if you have or create a page called ‘Archives’)
• Automatic Photo page layout with Flickr (if you have or create a page called ‘Photos’ and have the FlickrRSS plugin installed)
• Automatic Links page layout with your blogroll links listed with their favicons (if you have or create a page called ‘Links’)

So as you can see it’s a pretty basic first implementation and although I want more, it’s hard to say anything negative because they are the first service to launch and I look forward to their sophmore effort which I already heard is underway.

Strands interface from Web App

You can download the app here. You can follow me on Strands here. If you’re not currently a user of Strands and would like to try it, leave a comment below and I’ll send you an invite.

Also, let me know if you like video reviews and would like to see me do more of them.

Other coverage

• Review of app from Louis Gray
• New of announcement at Venture Beat
• Official announcement on Strands blog