Technical Notes
March 11, 2009
OK, folks, I hate to distract with minutiae but I have spent some time doing some things with the ol’ site here. Normally I keep quiet about things like this (I am quite often tinkering, but I imagine most of you read via RSS anyway), but this is something I haven’t quite exactly seen done before. Specifically:
- Working with Aileen and other Cloud Four folks, I wrote a WordPress plugin that uses WURFL data to evaluate capabilities of various client devices. That is to say, if you’re using a swanky Android phone, it will see you in a different light than your quick-and-dirty Nokia. The plugin will choose the right plugin for your device on the fly and you’ll get (I hope) something usable when you visit my site.
- iPhone-specific plugins abound, and some other mobile-focused things, but I’m not sure if anyone’s ever done such a broad WURFL-based approach. Shrug. Maybe they have.
- I bet there are holes here. I patched my WURFL data today but, previously, my aunt Catherine’s desktop FireFox was somehow making it think she was a mobile phone. So. Let me know if you see something wonktastic.
- The three mobile device themes are lightweight (just a few kilobytes each), validate fully via W3C specs for their various doc types (XHTML-MP, WML) and get good grades from the YSlow FireFox extension.
- Aileen did the design and styling for the iPhone/Android/swank theme, which was loosely based on the iWPhone by Content Robot plugin and theme.
- The plugin I wrote would nominally be able to create device classes on arbritrary criteria–anything that WURFL tracks. I’m not sure if I’ll invest the time to make it extensible and administrate-able in the WordPress Web-based admin area. As you may know, I have been life-alteringly, crushingly, sanity-endingly, brain-exploding, wall-hitting-with-head, immune-system-destroyingly* busy lately.
* More on this soon.
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Hey Lyza, where would a WP user who wants to try out your extension find it?