Preface
WordPress is fast becoming the world’s most popular website for Content Management System (CMS)—it now powers 22 percent of new domains in the USA. WordPress has a comparatively quick learning curve and with the use of plugins and custom code, can be made to run just about any website, no matter how complex is the functionality needed.
As more and more of us use devices such as smartphones and tablets to browse the Web instead of a desktop computer, the need for websites to be fast and user-friendly on those devices is getting more important. Mobile development is very hot in web design circles right now, with constant advances in techniques such as a responsive design and mobile-first content strategy ensuring that websites not only look good on mobile devices, but also give users the content and the experience they want.
If you’re one among the millions of people who own or manage a WordPress site, you’re probably already thinking about making it mobile-friendly. If you’re a WordPress developer, you may have been asked to develop a mobile-friendly site by a client, or possibly you’re considering it for your own site.
As we will see in this book, there are a number of ways to do this, ranging from the quick and dirty to the complex and potentially beautiful. By using a plugin, you can quickly make your site easier to read and interact with on mobile devices, or you can go further, harnessing the combined power of PHP, CSS, and relevant APIs to create a web app—a website that looks and behaves like a native app.
This book will take you through the process of making a self-hosted WordPress site (as opposed to a wordpress.com site) mobile-friendly. We will be working with the site for Carborelli’s, a fictitious ice cream parlor using its website to advertise its store and sell ice cream online. You’ll learn a variety of ways to make this site look and perform better on mobile devices, and we’ll work up to mobile e-commerce and finally, using WordPress to create a web app for Carborelli’s.
This book focuses on mobile development, so it’s worth identifying exactly what we mean when referring to different devices. The following are the definitions of some of the devices we will be using:
- Smartphones: They include iPhones, Android phones, Windows Phone 7, Blackberry, and any phone with a browser capable of accessing websites and displaying them in the same way as a desktop browser would. These are the phones we will be targeting in this book.
- Feature phones: These are the phones, which include some advanced features, in addition to making phone calls, but do not have the advanced capabilities of smartphones and do not include a fully-featured browser. We will not be targeting them in this book, except for in Chapter 1, Using Plugins to Make Your Site Mobile-friendly, with mobile plugins.
- Mobile devices: Mobile devices, as referred to in this book, include smartphones and small personal devices running a mobile operating system, for example, the iPod Touch, but not tablets.
- Tablets: These are the devices with a larger display than mobile devices, but they use a mobile operating system. These include the iPad, Samsung Galaxy Tab, Blackberry Playbook, and Kindle Fire. We will focus on the iPad in this book, as it is by far the most widely used tablet device.
The distinction between smartphones and feature phones is blurred, but you can find more information at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feature_phone.