WordPress.com certainly “gets” mobile. Two years ago the freemium blogging service broke new ground by delivering mobile friendly versions of the 5 Million plus blogs it hosts to all mobile browsers. This month WordPress launched a major redesign for one of the two mobile themes it uses.

WordPress had been using an older version of the WPTouch mobile theme for modern smartphones and a lightweight theme based on Alex King’s WordPress Mobile Edition plugin for feature phones and legacy smartphone browsers.    The latest change is that smartphone browsers now get a slick new mobile theme called Minileven which replaces WPTouch. The Minileven name comes from the fact that the theme is based on the popular Twenty Eleven WordPress desktop theme.

Minileven is served to the iOS, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry OS 5 and later, Symbian 3rd ed. and later and WebOS browsers and to Opera Mini and Opera Mobile. Other mobile browsers get the lightweight WordPress Mobile Edition based theme.

Minileven looked and worked well with all the browsers I tried. A nice thing about the new theme is that it will use the header and background images and widgets from the site’s desktop theme, which helps maintain a site’s branding across platforms. It’s not a lightweight theme (average page size is over a megabyte) which might be a concern for those of you on slow or metered data plans.

Minileven is  only available to sites hosted on WordPress.com. There’s currently no Minileven plugin for self hosted blogs using WordPress.org software although there are loads of other mobile theming plugins available from the WordPress.org Plugin Directory.

Source: WordPress.com News