WordPress, meet iPad: Getting to Grips with Your Theme

Now WordPress is installed we’ve got to install a theme and make it all shiny. I’m using the brand new Briefed Theme from Woo Themes. It’s not often that I shell out for just the one theme but Briefed, designed by Cameron Moll, is really nice and I’d never be able to make one quite so lovely. Anyhow, enough drool.

Installing the Theme

We’ve got the same deal here as we did with installing WordPress. If you’re installing themes straight from the theme repository then it won’t be a problem. But if, like me, you have downloaded a theme and need to install it via FTP then you’ll need to run through the same process as I did with the WordPress installation using iCab and Goodreader. I’ll go through it again briefly.

1. Download the theme using iCab

2. Copy the theme from iCab to Goodreader. Unzip the theme

4. Navigate to your themes folder via FTP

5. Upload the theme.

Done! Now you can activate it via the WordPress admin page.

Last night I set up my theme. Rather unexcitingly it’s not a whole lot different to setting up a theme on your computer – just a bit more touch screeny. I’m not going to go through setting up your theme as the process is the same as how you would on a PC but there are a few things that I want to note.

ICab vs Safari

My page looks totally different in iCab to how it does in Safarai. It looks to me like iCab isn’t showing the Google Fonts. Check out the difference:

If you are using iCab you should view your page in Safari to see how it looks. This is very annoying and makes iCab less ideal for building websites.

Widgets

You cannot drag and drop widgets using iOS. You can, however, still add widgets using the following steps.

1. Select “screen options” from the tab at the top

2. Enable accessibility mode

3. Click add on the widget you want to add

4. Add the info and then decide where it goes

5. Save

Not quite as easy as on your computer but it’s definitely workable.

Visual Editor

TinyMCE does not work on the iPad. This means that when you go to add pages and edit content your editor will default to the HTML editor, instead of TinyMCE. This could be annoying if you aren’t comfortable writing the HTML code straight into your editor.

This is going to be more of an issue tomorrow, when I get on to adding content. Then I’m going to try to update all of my pages using the WordPress for iOS app, and take a look at cropping and resizing images for across the site.

If you want to see how the site is going you can check it out here (if you can bear it’s current messy state!)