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The Massive News “Mobile Edition” WordPress Theme
WordPress, the iPhone and iPod Touch have finally become best friends with the introduction of my latest theme, “Massive News” Mobile Edition. The popularity of the iPhone and iPod Touch are on the rise, and I felt it just made sense to create a WordPress theme that is built entirely for optimized viewing on both devices. The Massive News Mobile Edition WordPress theme does just that, bringing you all the perks of WordPress to boot.
I have been interested in mobile web development since the introduction of the Sony PSP several years ago, but the iPhone really made things interesting with it’s near full browsing capabilities. Massive News Mobile is a light weight, clean, fast and elegant theme that is a perfect solution for anyone that needs to deploy a mobile friendly site for the iPhone or iPod Touch.
Have a look for yourself… just point your iPhone or Touch browser to http://www.wpelements.com/demos/massivemobile/ for a full working demonstration of the theme.
How to Post Featured Content
Simply create a 90×90 pixel image that you want to use as your featured image, send it the the optional excerpt field when writing a featured post, then just make sure to create and post your featured articles within a category called “Featured”. That’s all you have to do. Once you click submit, you featured article will be displayed on the front page of your mobile site.
Installation, License & Download
Upon download, you agree that in no way shape or form that the Massive News Mobile theme files will be Re-Sold or Re-Distributed. Also, please leave credit where credit is due.
In order to install the Massive News Mobile theme, download the package below, unzip, and upload the directory titled “massive-mobile” to your “wp-content/themes” folder and activate the theme within your WordPress admin.
The Massive Mobile theme uses Lester Chan’s WP-PageNavi plugin for pagination. I have already modified the pagenavi CSS to match the Massive Mobile theme. All you have to do is upload the included “pagenavi” folder to your “wp-content/plugins” folder and activate it within your WordPress admin.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.
Latest Version
Massive News Mobile v1.0 (March 6th 2008)
Massive News Mobile Theme (556KB ZIP)
Almost forgot… to customize your site logo, all you have to do is edit “logo.jpg” located within the “massive-mobile/images” theme folder.
March 6th, 2008 at 9:50 pm
Jason - Just tested the mobile version on my iPod and it looks absolutely wonderful - really well done!
But just a bit of a question… Considering that the iPhone & iPod essentially degrades a website very well (with easy zooming and scrolling) - do you think it’s necessary to create a mobile version, instead of just having a normal sized website?
March 7th, 2008 at 1:39 am
So Cool!
March 7th, 2008 at 1:44 am
I can see Adii in many blog!!
I have download his NEWS by free,but I don’t use
March 7th, 2008 at 1:49 am
http://www.yanjiecao.com
March 7th, 2008 at 5:08 am
WoW….. I love this.
March 7th, 2008 at 5:28 am
Another reason for me to get an iPod Touch!
March 7th, 2008 at 6:59 am
Adii… For the most part, this was just a fun project that I threw together out of my own interest. As you said, the iPhone and iPod Touch are very capable of browsing the web as is, but at the same time, I still think it is somewhat valuable to build mobile versions of certain websites depending on who your target audience is.
March 7th, 2008 at 7:28 am
Very slick and very clean, Steve would be proud!
I’m trying to understand how it would run side-by-side with the “full size” blog; your description leads me to believe it can be done but the install instructions and what I believe to be true based on the simple technical requirements tell me the opposite.
Can you give a little bit more detail on how this mobile site would work w/ a full blown site?
March 7th, 2008 at 9:11 am
Chip… As of right now, this is a stand-alone theme. However there is an existing WP plugin that does what you are talking about at: http://iwphone.contentrobot.com/.
March 7th, 2008 at 1:14 pm
I’ve just tested it on my PSP and it looks great on it too.
March 10th, 2008 at 7:05 am
Aaron… Never thought about testing this on the PSP, but I’m glad to hear that it looks good. Bonus!
March 11th, 2008 at 10:46 am
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March 16th, 2008 at 11:21 am
That is very cool indeed , must say a job well done ? but one thing that how will it look on other mobile phones other than the iPhone suppose like Nokia N95 if you could modify it to make it work on other cellphones too it would be super cool !
March 18th, 2008 at 1:08 pm
There is now a french translation of this theme here : http://wordpress-tuto.fr/theme-wordpress-massive-news-mobile-edition-354
March 25th, 2008 at 10:11 pm
Really So Cool !!!
March 26th, 2008 at 1:23 pm
Firstly, this theme is -awesome-. Thank you.
I just got done retooling it a bit to work with the iWPhone plugin (displays an iphone theme only in the iPhone / iPod Touch Safari).
I do suggest one official fix in the header, as I ran into issues with the theme when I was in landscape (widescreen / sideways / etc.) mode. When in landscape, I experienced horizontal scrolling ad right alignment.
Find the following lines in the header.php file:
Replace them with this:
No more horizontal scrolling.
I love you for this theme.
The end.
March 30th, 2008 at 9:33 am
I’m playing around with your mobile theme for WordPress 2.5 and I’ve noticed two issues:
1) I have 4 articles published, all “featured”, but it only shows 3 on the homepage, but the featured image for the one that is missing is showing on top. It used to be my first (oldest) article, that disappeared when I had 3, but when I added the 4th article, the first (oldest) showed back up and the second to oldest disappeared. What could be causing this?
2) On an iphone when the phone is turned sideways the page shifts to the right, leaving a large amount of white space, instead of staying centered.
I hope this helps you as much as me. Thanks for you great work on this interesting theme. The website in question is http://www.moebis.com
March 30th, 2008 at 11:05 am
Carl… First off, I have the theme set to only display 3 featured articles. If you want it to display more, you will have to edit the loop within the main index file. As for your second issue, I didn’t really consider panoramic view when designing the theme, but I will keep this in mind for the next release.
March 30th, 2008 at 11:30 am
Jason,
I fixed the problem with some posts deciding to disappear from the front page. In the index.php this has to be removed:
if( $post->ID == $do_not_duplicate ) continue; update_post_caches($posts);
….I removed the do_not_duplicate and the update_post_caches because I don’t need the caches and the do_not_duplicate does not work correctly on WP 2.5.
Also, the post above gave a solution for the horizontal scroll but the comment system must have cut the code out. His name was Josiah. The landscape mode works fine if you load the page on an iphone starting in that position, but if you turn it and then turn back, it pushes half the page off the screen. I’ll help you get this to version 2.0 for WP 2.5 if you like. I think the future is mobile web, and you’re definitely at the forefront with this one!
March 31st, 2008 at 5:32 am
The Massive News “Mobile Edition” WordPress Theme…
The popularity of the iPhone and iPod Touch are on the rise, and I felt it just made sense to create a WordPress theme that is built entirely for optimized viewing on both devices.
The Massive News Mobile Edition WordPress theme does just that, bring…
April 3rd, 2008 at 1:51 am
Jason, I’ve just started developing a small blog aimed to mobile people. Even if it starts as a free experiment, I could end up with some advertising in the future. I’ve taken a look to your license and I guess it could be not ok for you if I make this use of your work. In the eventuality my blog grows up to that, could I pay for the commercial (or semi-commercial) use of your *wonderful* theme? And to make some customizations too? How much will you charge me for this?
Thank you very much!
Bye
Enrico
April 10th, 2008 at 11:12 am
Jason, ty for the theme. This was exactly what I was looking for when I started a new site. My new site is news based focused around corporate greed. Your theme makes my news posts look very professional. Keep up the good work.
http://corporateabuse.net
April 21st, 2008 at 5:55 am
have you look @ the internet explorer? it looks like a little bit crazy!
April 24th, 2008 at 12:24 pm
tweak er up then pixels
April 24th, 2008 at 3:36 pm
One word ….”Awesome”
April 26th, 2008 at 10:52 pm
take a look at IE..The theme is broken.but on mozilla looks great
April 27th, 2008 at 7:24 pm
This theme is intended for iphone and ipod browsers ONLY. IE was not considered when developing the theme.
April 28th, 2008 at 1:14 pm
Funny to see there is a theme for mobil phones… hopefully it will be a hit!
May 1st, 2008 at 2:31 pm
thanks
May 7th, 2008 at 9:07 pm
Hi,
I love your theme.
I cannot get the next page tag to work. I insert it but when I view the posts it doesn’t break the post into more than one post, it just shows all of it on one.
Any suggestions anyone?
May 12th, 2008 at 9:16 pm
This theme looks great! Is there a way to use this plugin with any other mobile plugins that are not for the iphone or ipod touch? It seems device detection is getting a bit more complicated with Apple and other web enabled mobile phones having different requirements. Thanks.
May 14th, 2008 at 10:35 pm
Thank you for good information.