MobilityNigeria is powered by WordPress. As such, the site uses the WordPress Mobile Edition (WME) plugin by Alex King to cater for mobile users. WordPress Mobile Edition presents a mobile-friendly version of WordPress sites to mobile versions. It is a great piece of work.

Up until a week or two ago, MobilityNigeria utilized WME version 2.1a, and it worked flawlessly. Then we upgraded to the sleek, new version 3.03 (3.04, the latest version, kept returning an activation error).

Yesterday night, I did some browsing on a more basic phone than the super-smartphones I normally use. Visiting MobilityNigeria on the phone’s browser returned an error to the effect that the page was “too large” to be downloaded. I repeatedly tried to access the site but got similar results.

Finally, I thought of checking another WordPress site that uses WME 3.03, www.davidajao.com/blog. Surprise, surprise – same result!

Note that MobilityNigeria never had this problem with even the most basic of mobile browsers when it was running WME 2.1a. I reverted to WME 2.1a this morning, and MobilityNigeria now loads fine on that same phone.

Clearly, WME 3.03 was doing something wrong. I see two options:

1. WME 3.03 is not redirecting the browser in question to the mobile version, and so the browser is attempting to load the web interface and finding it too large, or
2. The default WME 3.03 theme (Carrington Mobile), which we used, is bloated, and the mobile browser in question finds it too large

I went through the mobile browser’s User Agent list for both WME 2.1a and WME 3.03, and besides the touch browsers, YahooCrawler, and Samsung Omnia agents added to 3.03, the list is the same.

From here, it looks like the problem is that of bloatware – the Carrignton Mobile theme just being too large for some mobile browsers to handle. But then, I may have missed something along the way.

Anyone facing these issues? Any ideas? I’ll also send a feedback to the developer, so we can see if anything can be worked out.

In the meantime, MobilityNigeria stays with WME 2.1a.