I’ve been using MobilePress for a while now on my blog. It’s a quick, easy way to make your WordPress blog friendly for all those crazy smartphones out there like iPhone, Android, Nokia, Palm Pre, etc. etc. You just add the plugin to your WordPress install, activate it, and you’re set.

My only issue with the plugin is that it doesn’t support alternate content for mobile devices. Sure you can post the same text in both places, but it doesn’t always work that way for things like very large images or YouTube embeds. Often you’ll want the desktop version to have the very large image, but the mobile version to have a small thumbnail. Likewise with videos you’ll want your desktop site to have the full video embed, but the mobile site to have a link to the 3GP version of your video. To solve this, I quickly wrote an extension to MobilePress that allows you to accomplish this using WordPress shortcodes. Here’s the result.

[mobile]

You’re on the mobile site!
see non-mobile version

[/mobile]

[nonmobile]

You’re on the non-mobile site!
see mobile version

[/nonmobile]

If you’re on the mobile site, you should only have seen a small thumbnail linking to a mobile version of the video. But if you’re on the normal version of the site, you’ll get the full video embed.

So how did that work exactly? In the post itself, place [mobile] at the beginning and [/mobile] at the end of any text you want to appear only on the mobile site. Likewise, for content that you don’t want to appear on the mobile site, you place [nonmobile] at the beginning and [/nonmobile] at the end of any text. For this post, here’s what the text looked like.

[mobile]
<h1>You're on the mobile site!</h1>
<a href="rtsp://rtsp-youtube.l.google.com/CkYLENy73wIaPQk4TalGJzJtDRMYDSANFEIJbXYtZ29vZ2xlSARSBXdhdGNoWg5DbGlja1RodW1ibmFpbGCLjNC-9__5m0oM/0/0/0/30/video.3gp">
<img src="http://i.ytimg.com/vi/DW0yJ0apTTg/default.jpg?w=160&h=120&sigh=uxtjuGf9Vjatje_YL3m1JSn0mMY" alt="video" width="160" height="120" style="border:2;margin:0px;" />
</a>
[/mobile]

[nonmobile]
<h1>You're on the non-mobile site!</h1>
<object width="425" height="344">
<param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/DW0yJ0apTTg&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0"&rt;</param&rt;
<param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param>
<param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param>
<embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/DW0yJ0apTTg&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed>
</object>
[/nonmobile]

Pretty easy, eh? Here’s the source code for the plugin.

function mobilecontent_func($atts, $content = null) {
	if ($_SESSION['SESS_MOBILE_ACTIVE'] === TRUE) {
		return $content;
	} else {
		return "";
	}
}

function nonmobilecontent_func($atts, $content = null) {
	if ($_SESSION['SESS_MOBILE_ACTIVE'] === TRUE) {
		return "";
	} else {
		return $content;
	}
}

add_shortcode('mobile', 'mobilecontent_func');
add_shortcode('nonmobile', 'nonmobilecontent_func');

That’s all there is to it. Each of these functions just checks for the existence of a session variable telling whether or not you are using the mobile version of MobilePress (the cookie management is handled entirely by MobilePress). Based on the session cookie, it either returns the text itself, or it returns an empty string.

I’ve only spent a few minutes writing the plug in, so I am curious if others would find this useful or if there are any obvious bugs or enhancements people notice.

You can download this MobilePress extension here, and let me know what you think.