Is in a nutshell, a pain in the butt. This is especially true if you are using a content management system because most CMSes, do not allow you to use multiple templates or themes at the same time.

We’ve been using WordPress for as long as it’s been in existence and all those years we have been looking for good plugins to give us mobile versions of our site with minimal upkeep. And there are plenty of solutions out there. One of the plugins we tried early on was WordPress Mobile Edition which I found workable but I didn’t like it and I really didn’t want to learn another theme framework just for mobile.

Then there are whole mobile theme solutions. They are OK and very do-able. If you only ever want to display the mobile design on all devices including desktop computers. Would be great if you’re building a dedicated mobile site but remember, we didn’t want to manage yet another site.

We are OK with perhaps creating and maintaining a handful of pages separately but the blog content should come up without additional fixing. And everything should be manageable within one site.

Finally, one thing pointed out by a friend made us drop the quest altogether – at least temporarily. Many plugins or themes force the mobile user to view the mobile edition. It does not allow the user the option to use the standard version and I feel it is important to allow the user the flexibility.

And so the quest ended. Then, we acquired a plugin that we really like. We like that we can:

• Make it automatically redirect or let us set it up where users can choose desktop or mobile views
• It doesn’t require us to give up our existing theme. Only upload a small page template. What’s nice is this page template is just like any other so if you are familiar with WordPress template system you will be very at home with it.
• If you’re not a WordPress person, the plugin does offer you 12 background design options and 7 different button and tab designs so you will have lots of flexibility.
• It pulls up your blog content and lets you have customized content for mobile devices just to highlight a few key things.

As with any plugin there are still many things we’d like to see but the difference is this time, we are free to add features, tweak it and make it better. In fact, we already made some fixes to it and have a list of things we will work on adding. If this sounds like something you can use, click to learn all about MobiPages mobile plugin for WordPress.