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Optimize your Blog for the iPhone with the IWPhone WordPress Plugin

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300x250 Optimize your Blog for the iPhone with the IWPhone WordPress Plugin

Even if iPhone and iPod Touch are very good for displaying web pages, zooming again and again can be a little boring sometimes. Happilly, IWPhone plugin is here to help by allowing you to automatically detect iPhone and iPod user agent and display an optimized theme.

Why optimizing your blog for iPhone

Why should I optimize my theme for the iPhone? My current theme renders very good. This sentence was probably what you thought first when you saw my post title. iPhone uses Safari, so, if your theme looks good on your Mac’s Safari, it will look good through the iPhone.

But there’s a quite boring thing: Having to zoom over and over is a bit boring, especially when text width is wider than iPhone screen. Also, it could be a good idea to use a more minimalistic theme, with no or less Javascript, to enhance browsing speed.

I just purchased an iPod Touch and i use it often to read webpages. A comfortable navigation through my mobile device became a criteria of quality for me. And I’m quite sure that some of your readers thinks the same.

ipod 001 Optimize your Blog for the iPhone with the IWPhone WordPress Plugin

How does it work?

Once you downloaded and unzipped the IWPhone plugin, you’ll see a file named iwphone.php and a iwphone-by-contentrobot directory.
The iwphone.php file is the plugin itself, while the iwphone-by-contentrobot directory is the theme that will be displayed only when the plugin will detect iPhone or iPod Touch user agent.

To install IWPhone, simply upload the iwphone.php file to your wp-content/plugins directory and the iwphone-by-contentrobot directory to your wp-content/themes.
Then, simply activate the IWPhone plugin in your WordPress admin panel.

That’s all. Now, when someone will visit your blog through an iPhone, the IWPhone theme will automaticly be displayed. If you own an iPhone or an iPod Touch, you should test it now and see how easy to read your blog is.

If you’re interested about customizing the IWPhone theme, you should read what I just posted on my blog.

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    • Jean-Baptiste Jung is a blogger/web developer/web designer who lives in the French-Speaking part of Belgium. Jean-Baptiste maintains two blogs: Cats Who Code.com where he and other authors write about Web Development, Web design, Blogging tips and WordPress, and WPRecipes.com where Jean shares useful WordPress snippets on a daily basis. When he's not blogging or having fun with codes, Jean loves to spend time with his wife and cat, and traveling everywhere he can.

    There Are 8 Responses So Far »

    • http://websuccessdiva.com Web Success Diva

      So many people are missing out if they are not making their blogs/website mobile friendly. Thanks for sharing!

      Maria Reyes-McDavis

    • http://cybersurge.org Michael

      I’m probably going to install this on my blog pretty soon. But, is there an option for an iPhone friendly WordPress admin panel theme? I often times want to do some comment moderation or write a quick post from my iPhone and the current admin theme is just terrible for the iPhone.

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    • http://www.catswhocode.com Jean-Baptiste Jung

      Hi Michael, IWPhone don’t have anything for the admin section, but I’m pretty sure this plugin will perfectly fits your needs.

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    • narendra.s.v

      wow thats a cool plugin to get iphone readers ;) will give it a go :D

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    • http://hackd.net inaequitas

      I would use the WPtouch plugin for rendering my blog to be as iPhone-friendly as possible, but it doesn’t quite work with WP Super Cache so no go. Have used iWPhone and I must say, not bad either, after a bit of theme-hacking.

      For the admin interface, maybe you have better luck with WPhone, for me it didn’t work. mobileadmin is also broken, but I’m waiting patiently for the native WordPress iPhone app that Auttomatic is working on.

    • sim

      Hmm but if my blog is hosted on wordpress.com, so iss possible to intal smewhere that plugin?

    • http://www.bykeywordstrategy.com Ray

      I will be testing this along with MobilePress.

    • http://www.iphoneapples.com Diedre Holleran

      This is inspiring I think I will start a blog myself one day in italian of course. Great post, grazie.