Professional Mobile Web Development with WordPress®, Joomla!®, and Drupal®

Chapter 12. Advanced WordPress Mobilization

You've looked at some off-the-shelf themes and plug-ins to get your WordPress site up and running for mobile users. In this chapter, you are going to go it alone and build a mobile experience from first principles on the WordPress platform. Although the results of your efforts may not be able to compete feature-by-feature with some of the third-party plugins discussed earlier, this gives you the opportunity to see how the processes work and how you can apply some of the general principles you learned in Part II to WordPress.

In this chapter, you are understandably delving into code. An understanding of PHP is advisable, but you take time to go through those parts that are specific to the WordPress API. You also assume that you've removed or deactivated all the plugins and themes mentioned in Chapter 11 and that you're running WordPress v3.0 or greater.

As in earlier chapters, you walk through the process using the simplest markup possible, but markup that can work reasonably reliably on a range of different handsets (in this case, an iPhone and a legacy Windows Mobile device again). At the end of the chapter, you explore how you can progressively enhance the theme for particular devices.

DEVELOPING YOUR OWN MOBILE THEME

You start off by creating a mobile theme that echoes the principles described in Chapters 6 and 8: namely, the ways in which mobile pages can be built from common user interface patterns. You start by working on the headers ...