WPtouch Theme
Posted by Mark on October 22nd, 2009
One for the iPhone owners out there – If you don’t have an iPhone you can ignore this post!
I’ve been alerted to a plugin which allows iPhone users to view the site in an iPhone friendly way.
Now, before you get all excited, please don’t expect the site to be fully functional, fully viewable or even entirely pretty in this mode. It makes some bits better, much of the site a little messy, strips out some of the useful stuff and renders some pages completely inoperable.
The good news is you can easily switch between iPhone mode and normal mode using a switch which, on all but the ‘members’ page appears at the bottom entitled ‘Mobile Theme On/Off’. The default is off so visiting the site on the iPhone by default gives you the normal browser view. Flip the switch to view the iPhone-ised version and vice versa if you don’t like the result.
This is being offered as is – if you encounter problems, can’t do what you wanted or simply don’t like how it looks, go back to normal view. The main benefit to iPhone users is that the forum listing looks like other iPhone lists and loads more quickly. The menu available in iPhone mode only lists the pages on the site which work to an acceptable degree.
Notable issues are as follows:
Pages which simply do not function in iPhone mode: Welcome (home page) & Events.
Pages with minor issues: Committee, Members & Gallery
Page layouts and formatting are generally lost in iPhone mode and switching the mode on/off takes you to the home page each time.
There is no effect on the Word Press admin screens and this only works when viewing the site on an iPhone or if you are weird and set certain browsers into iPhone mode!
It would be interesting to hear what people with iPhones think however please do be aware that this is what it is and I’m not able to make it do anything differently… you are at the mercy of an iPhone loving plugin programmer!
Mark
(Webmaster)
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#3533 | | Hide Post Comments |
Interestingly, with this plugin installed, even if iPhone users turn off the theme, the normal GLUG homepage displays much better – probably because it’s setting a fixed width for the page, rather than trying to squeeze it into the 480 (or even 320) pixel width of an iPhone display. (I originally designed the site so that the pages stretch to fit whatever size window you’re using – but this also means they can get squashed too!
Cheers for implementing this, Mark !