One of my favorite sites for keeping up with things on the mobile web is WapReview.com, written by Dennis Bournique. This guy has a knack for finding cool mobile-friendly websites and services, and is always in the know. Today, Dennis brought news of a new WordPress plugin from DotMobi. I’m currently using Alex King’s WP-Mobile plugin here on RickyCadden.com for you guys, and am using WPhone for mobile access to the backend of things. WPhone sucks, though, since the developers decided to ignore all phones other than the iPhone and cease development, which is uber-lame.
In any case, this new plugin from DotMobi does the same thing that WP-Mobile does, though it seems to add a few more options here and there. The main features that attract me are the built-in ability to redirect mobile browsers to an mdot URL, as well as the widget support and QR Code generator.
I don’t particularly care for DotMobi, normally, as I think that while the idea of .mobi websites is good, convincing the world that they need to purchase yet another domain for a mobile version of their site is ridiculous. As I stated previously, consumers shouldn’t need to care whether they type in m.rickycadden.com, rickycadden.mobi, or even rickycadden.com/iwanttoseethisonmyphone – they should automatically get your content, formatted in the best way for their specific device, without having to do anything.
That being said, I’ll be testing out this new WordPress Mobile Pack from DotMobi over the weekend, and will let you know when you can give it a test drive.
Also, it seems as though this plugin offers some mobilization for the WordPress backend, a feature that is sorely missing. WPhone still works, but it’s incredibly crude, and doesn’t work 100% of the time. I’d like to see either WordPress, Alex King, or I suppose DotMobi stepping up in this arena. It shouldn’t be too hard, really. If it’s Alex or DotMobi, hopefully they’ll mobilize the administration side of vBulletin, too, while they’re at it.
Ricky Cadden 