Optimizing a Wordpress blog for the Wii
Here are some general guidelines which should keep in mind to ensure your WordPress temples display properly in the Opera browser on the Nintendo Wii. Much of this applies to any web page designed for the Wii Internet Channel.
I was planning on customising a Wordpress template to detect if the browser has the User-Agent for the Wii Opera browser (Opera/9.00 (Nintendo Wii; U; ; 1038-58; Wii Shop Channel/1.0; en)), and display a custom css stylesheet accordingly. Turns out, this has already been done with the WordPress Wii Edition Plugin (WiiPress v1.3) !! I’ll probably tweak it a little in the future, but it works well enough to use “out of the box” !!
(For Firefox users who wanting to see this site using the stylesheets designed for the Wii, install the Switch User Agent Add-on and add the User-Agent “Opera/9.00 (Nintendo Wii; U; ; 1038-58; Wii Shop Channel/1.0; en)”, then reload this site).
Here are some links with general guidance to make pages display better on the Wii:
July 25th, 2007 at 6:08 am
Just a quick note to say that my blog linked above was written before the final release of the browser and a few things have changed. Handheld media type is not available on the single column view for example.
One of the most useful new additions is that the TV media type is supported. i’d recommend just adding a TV stylesheet to your Wordpress template that styles the site as needed on a TV set such as larger fonts so that zoom is not needed, and shorter text width lengths (make sure when you zoom in that the text length is not wider than the screen width). On three column designs, you may want to push the third column below the content too.
The advantage over detecting the user agent is that it’ll benefit any future browser for TVs and set top boxes.
admin Says:July 29th, 2007 at 5:39 am
Hey, thanks for the tip !
I guess setting the media type in an alternate stylesheet is the ‘right way’ to do it (tweaking pages via User-Agent detection is soooo 1996
). Eventually, when I get time, I’ll update the theme on this site to use media=”tv” rather than the User-Agent detection.
Cheers,
Andrew