Jetpack 1.8: Mobile Theme

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According to very respected research, it’s estimated that approximately a lot of people browse the Web via a mobile device.  When those people view your site, are they seeing your site in the best possible format for their small screen?  With the new Mobile Theme in Jetpack, you can be sure that they are.

Jetpack’s Mobile Theme displays your content in a clean, uncluttered interface, making it easy for mobile visitors to scan your site. We took special care to make the mobile theme as lightweight as possible to ensure quick navigation and fast loading times for those sometimes spotty mobile connections.

The mobile theme is opt-in, so you’ll have to manually enable it from the Jetpack dashboard.  For more information, see the Jetpack Mobile Theme support page.

The mobile theme isn’t the only upgrade in Jetpack 1.8: we’ve included a great new “Top Posts and Pages” widget, and now, multiple users on Jetpack sites can connect with their own WordPress.com accounts. These new connections will enable exciting additions in future Jetpack releases such as integrating the WordPress.com Notifications system into Jetpack sites.

We haven’t just been adding feature after amazing feature; we’ve fixed some bugs too. Custom CSS has been improved, and the links in the Twitter widget have been corrected. For a complete list of bug fixes, see the changelog.

Update: Jetpack 1.8.1 has been released to address some issues with Jetpack 1.8.

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Christopher Finke profile
Christopher Finke

Chris's hobbies include cooking, woodworking, and writing short bios about himself.

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Comments

  1. gerardopedraza says:

    “… it’s estimated that approximately a lot of people browse the Web via a mobile device. ” Approximately a lot of people, wow it must be a very respected research 🙂

    Like

  2. sushubh says:

    Nice to have it though a lot of new themes have responsive design which means they automatically convert to mobile format without any plugin. good to have this as an option!

    Like

  3. Jonathan Schikowski (@schikowski) says:

    Hi Christopher, I’m getting a 404 on http://jetpack.me/support/mobile-theme/

    Like

  4. Jeremy says:

    Reblogged this on Jeremy Herve and commented:

    Jetpack 1.8 is out, and brings yet another new feature from WordPress.com to self-hosted WordPress blogs: a Mobile theme!

    Like

  5. Eric Schwarz says:

    This is pointless, the appropriate thing to do is have a theme that is responsive. I’m truly glad that it is an opt-in feature.

    Like

    • sushubh says:

      I love the under development Twenty Twelve theme. Very high quality stuff there. Responsive and beautiful!

      Like

    • Alex Mills says:

      Yes responsive is usually (but not always) the best solution but not everyone uses a responsive theme and those that don’t probably don’t want to switch themes just for their mobile users. This provides a happy alternative for those folks and is very far from pointless. 🙂

      Like

  6. Dave Zatz (@davezatz) says:

    Can we have a setting to disable the sidebar in the mobile theme? Or add a specific Mobile Sidebar widget? As designed, it doesn’t translate well at all for me. Also, do we know how this interacts with caching plugins? Thanks!

    Like

  7. rhcv says:

    Thanks for giving us the option. Especially for those non-responsive themes this is a major breakthrough!! 😀

    Like

  8. N Atta Kusi Adusei says:

    Great work, guys! One issue though: shortcodes are not parsed in the mobile theme. Hope to get a fix asap. Keep it up 🙂

    Like

    • Christopher Finke says:

      In order to have shortcodes parsed on pages other than the permalink, you’ll need to disable excerpts on the home page and on archive pages for the mobile theme. This option is accessible via the “Configure” button under the Mobile Theme module on the Jetpack dashboard.

      Like

  9. johnyw says:

    The jetpack Carousel is not showing as it should. The text under the images aligns vertical, instead of horizontal…

    Like

  10. Albert Albs says:

    Thank you very much for the great feature update. @Christopher Finke
    But I have one suggestion: Can you enable Google Plus login in WP Jetpack comments? Because we don’t want to login via Facebook and Twitter. Normally most of the time, everyone connected to Gmail and it is very easy for comment login.

    Like

  11. gdanmitchell says:

    A couple issues:

    1. I downloaded and installed the new Jetpack on my site hosted via blue host. The stats reporting feature is now broken. Where I used to see the small thumbnail stats image in the tool bar on my home page I now see a broken image icon and clicking it to see updated stats just gets me “We were unable to get your stats just now. Please try again.” (Stats are still available by directly logging in to wordpress.com acct.)

    2. Perhaps related (?) the Top Posts and Page widget only displays “There are no posts to display.”

    I’m not grumpy! I love Jetpack and use many of its features, and I was surprised to encounter problems with this install.

    Thanks,

    Dan

    Like

  12. TrekkingToGod says:

    Nice to know that “it’s estimated that approximately a lot of people” are browsing that way. J

    Like

  13. Matt Wiebe says:

    Reblogged this on WiebePress and commented:
    Now you can use WordPress.com’s mobile theme on your WordPress.org site.

    Like

  14. Stephane Daury says:

    Reblogged this on tekArtist and commented:

    Minileven, the new mobile theme in Jetpack, stemmed from my team’s “hack week” project at last year’s Automattic meetup in Budapest. Glad to see it spread! 🙂

    Like

  15. John Hoyle says:

    It would be helpful to have a “Full / Mobile” view selector at both bottom and top of the mobile page view. If it is in Full view without excerpts being chosen, it can be a long scroll down the page before the reader sees the option.

    Like

  16. tvgoodness says:

    I just udpated jetpack and our site stats have disappeared. I don’t know how to get them back. Hopefully you can help, if not can you please direct me to someone who can help? I also left a message at your the jetpack facebook page.

    Like

  17. Guido vanden Elshout (@HappyHotelier) says:

    Loved Jetpack for its stats.
    Upgraded from 1.7 No more stats
    Going back to 1.7

    Like

  18. jacopotarantino says:

    I tried installing JetPack 1.8 and also ran into the bug that kills the stats. Additionally when I tried to turn on the mobile theme feature it killed our site (500s for anything on the front end). This may just be our fault since everything is custom and poorly coded but I feel like the plugin shouldn’t take our whole site down.

    Like

  19. aushiker says:

    I have the mobile theme option but not the “Top Posts and Pages” widget or am I looking in the wrong place? I assumed it would be under the Extra Sidebar Widgets button.

    Like

    • Christopher Finke says:

      If you have the Extra Sidebar Widgets module enabled, the Top Posts and Pages widget will be available on the normal WordPress widgets page.

      Like

  20. Beth @ Snaps of Our Life says:

    When will the stats bug be worked out?

    Like

  21. Toddlers On Tour (@toddlersontour) says:

    Hi,
    I have just activated and configured the mobile theme however it doesn’t appear to be working on my Asus Tablet. I have the Travel Blogger Theme.
    Very excited if I can get it working.

    Like

  22. strags says:

    Thanks for this but . . . having enabled it, how do I turn it off? The mobile theme renders well but produces two lengthy “Warning” messages (wrapper is disabled in the server configuration . . and unable to open stream: no suitable wrapper could be found) before the site appears..

    Like

    • Christopher Finke says:

      These warnings have been fixed in Jetpack 1.8.1, and you can disable the Mobile Theme from the Jetpack dashboard if you still want to do that.

      Like

  23. JamesMcwhorter says:

    Great work, guys.

    My birthday is next week but I feel like it’s today. 😉

    Looking forward to seeing more development on this front.

    Like

  24. Sajib says:

    Well, how do I edit the mobile theme? Like I have extra stuff in my single.php that aren’t appearing on mobile theme. I’d like to add them but I can’t find where. Help?

    Like

    • Christopher Finke says:

      The theme files are in plugins/jetpack/modules/minileven/theme/pub/minileven/. However, if you modify the files directly, your changes will be overwritten the next time you update Jetpack.

      Like

  25. lbonesini says:

    Hi. Just installed 1.8.1 (stats are ok now) but I’m still having problem with the ‘community’ items (activities, users, groups, forum) on BuddyPress which show a blank page (I’m using the BuddyPress default theme).

    Like

  26. Christian Leu says:

    I really like Jetpack, but as my site is responsive, i will not use the mobile theme. On the other side, I’m wondering if the Carousel has already fixed for a better mobile view experience?

    Like

  27. portsmouthpolice says:

    Greetings! Would you please take a look at our development site from any mobile device ( http://jobs.portsmouthpd.org/wordpressdev/ )? Before installing JetPack, I took a look at the mobile theme option; the screenshot depicts the main-menu as being collapsed with the user having the option to expand into sub-menus when the main-menu is pressed/clicked on. The problem I’m experiencing is that our menu has completely expanded by default when the site is accessed from a mobile device. I can’t figure out why. The main theme is YOKO which has modified CSS to accommodate our design and branding. Our preference would be for the menu to be collapsed as depicted in the screen shot. Thanks in advance for any pointers for fixing this…I really hope to get the menu fixed and then everything would be golden.

    Like

  28. goldtop says:

    The mobile theme is useful for formatting the content for mobile, except for the fact it ignores our own navigation (and replaces with links to default Home & About pages)

    Like

  29. Jedediah White says:

    This is awesome! I just found this feature today and have enabled it on a number of WordPress-based sites I’ve done. I’m still researching/learning to develop responsive themes so this has really saved me some work. If I’m interested in editing the theme, it’s just the twenty-twelve theme folder, correct?

    Like

    • Christopher Finke says:

      The theme files are in plugins/jetpack/modules/minileven/theme/pub/minileven/; however, if you modify the files directly, your changes will be overwritten the next time you update Jetpack.

      Like

  30. Eduardo Galaz (@edugalaz) says:

    This is very good!

    Like

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