Using WordPress to produce iPhone optimised website

I volunteer at Hospital Radio Chelmsford as I have since 1991 and recently they have released a new website and Facebook Fan Page to improve their online presence.

This lead me onto helping them to create an iPhone oprtimised website to run in conjunction with the main site. I knew that the facility existed in wordpress to automatically format the page into a readable experience on the iPhone so I thought I would write up how I did it so if anyone else wishes to do it they can.

As with anything run by volunteers the idea is to reduce effort/time to a minimum so the webmaster did not want it to increase his workload. The main site already produced a couple of different RSS feeds and so this was key to automating the process.

I installed a wordpress installation into the /iphone/ directory on the website which was going to be the url and from there it was down to the plugins. Firstly the plugin I used which formats the site for iPhone is called ‘WPtouch iPhone Theme’ and then to import the RSS feeds and process them as Posts I used a plugin called ‘FeedWordPress’.

Both of these plugins once installed are easy to configure to your needs. The FeedWordPress allows you to set a category for each RSS feed you import and it will automatically poll the RSS feeds every hour for changes so the webmaster needs do nothing except update the main site.

From there it was just a matter of making a front page which would be the static page on the site you would see when first visiting the site and getting hold of any missing icons I needed. I bit of searching around found me the html I needed to get the site to operate the SMS messages and the Calling function from the site which automatically makes the iPhone go into the SMS app or the Phone app.

All this work can be seen at the site which is www.hrc.org.uk/iphone. It doesn’t look pretty if viewing in the normal web browser but on the iPhone or Android phone it formats correcly but feel free to copy the html if you want.

Hope you find this of interest – Matt