Although we began work last year on Safari based WordPress Theme and Plugin suite that had potential to offer the untethered convenience of mobile blogging, we were beat to the punch by Automattic/Effigent. Built on the iPhone SDK as a native Cocoa Touch app makes a robust touch UI crisp in its access and delivery.

Splendid as a portable notepad where you can quickly start local drafts of posts. Later, when you’re on the desktop, local drafts get posted to remote drafts for editing and production tasks.

The ability to easily integrate photos by the standard camera and photo library API is perfect for screen shots in this case.

Rumors of a copy and paste feature in iPhone 2.1 abound. This WordPress Touch client really won’t be complete until a great select and hyperlink user interface is developed.

Mobile Touch Screen WordPress Theme In The Works

In response to the proliferating importance of portable touch-screen interfaces, we have started the design and development of a WordPress theme for iPhone and iPod Touch devices. The theme will make your WordPress site look and behave like a native application, taking advantage of the special requirements of a touch-screen, flick-and-slide scroll interface minimizing zoom-pinching, all using Joe Hewitt’s iUI JavaScript and CSS library.

The project is currently in a pre-alpha release state. We have released an early alpha, with a distant dream publish it to the official WordPress theme site. Anyone who is interested in helping to test and develop the concept should contact us by email. Let it be known that we are not the first to attempt a WordPress iUI theme, although we are working a more comprehensive implementation than what Justin Barkhuff has already achieved while on his year-long honeymoon!

» Try WordPress Touch pre-alpha on your iPhone or iPod Touch.

If the Touch theme does not appear right away, keep trying, by refreshing or revisiting this link. For some reason, the cookie that tells WordPress to use this theme isn’t registering correctly.

Release Notes

• You can simulate the experience by viewing the Touch theme without an iPhone or iPod Touch by using Safari 3.1 or the Webkit nightly build, the iPhoney simulator, or the official iPhone simulator as part of the SDK.
• Viewing this theme in other browsers will probably yield unpredictable and undesirable results.
• Your browser will remember your theme choice in a cookie. To reset back to the standard theme, choose Preferences > Theme > Desktop within the Touch theme main menu.
• As stated above, if you don’t succeed in triggering the WordPress Touch theme to appear, be persistent. This is an known issue to be resolved. It has something to do with the theme switcher plugin I’m using.

Design Goals

• Optimize WordPress consumption for the WebKit touchscreen user-interface model — in progress
• Focus on mobile use-cases, to allow a quick consume, easy lookups — in progress
• Employ best practices for iPhone and iPod Touch interface design conventions — in progress
• Allow options for auto-detection, user-selection and return to standard desktop views — in progess
• Introduce glossy icons for menus, with preference to disable — to do
• Introduce auto-resizing thumbnail management and disabling LightBox photo gallery features — to do