How do mobile plugins work?

The dozens of plugins that help us create mobile sites, do different jobs. The main kinds of plugins you will come across are as follows:

• Plugins that switch the site's theme when someone visits it on a mobile device, known as switchers. To use one of these, we would have to create a separate mobile theme. We will look at some of these plugins and how they can support app-like sites, in Chapter 9, Adding Web App Functionality.

• Plugins that help deliver different content to mobile devices, saving on load times and data transfer. These plugins work well with responsive sites, so we will look at some of them in Chapter 7, Sending Different Content to Different Devices.

• Plugins that use a third-party service to power our mobile site. These run the site through the service provider's servers and usually require an activation key or an account with the provider.

• Plugins that quickly and easily make our site mobile-friendly, displaying the content differently on mobile devices and making the site easier to read and interact with.

The preceding are the plugins we will be focusing on in this chapter.

The plugins we will work with in this chapter are all free and available in the WordPress plugin repository (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/). There are premium plugins available (and premium versions of some of the free plugins), but here we will be sticking with the free ones.

In this chapter, we will see how each plugin renders the Carborelli's site on a mobile device. On a desktop, this is how the site looks:

We will experiment with some plugins, which can quickly and easily make the site mobile friendly, while keeping as much functionality, content, and design as possible. If you have your own desktop site that you're making mobile-friendly, you can try the same plugins out on that, too.