New Theme: HandHeld
Today I am excited to announce that our mobile theme, HandHeld, has been released! The way that the world is consuming the internet is changing as more and more people begin to use their smartphones to browse the web. This introduces a problem for webmasters, as their websites (which have been built for large desktop screens) create an awkward browsing experience on handheld devices. Our new theme fixes this problem by providing you with a theme that has been built specifically to enhance the mobile experience. In order to preview the live demo, you will need to visit the demo on your mobile phone. You can view the preview installation here:
HandHeld is a WordPress plugin that works alongside your normal theme, serving an alternate layout to your mobile visitors. This alternate design creates an enhanced mobile experience, and is only shown to your users when they visit your website on a mobile device. This means that HandHeld will work with any website, even if you are not using an Elegant Theme. The design is also fluid and responsive, which means it will work great on any size phone and will also adjust to landscape mode when the phone is rotated 90 degrees.
HandHeld Features
1. Smooth Ajax Loading – HandHeld features seamless ajax loading techniques that allow your visitors to load additional posts without refreshing the entire page. This helps reduce loading times, which is important when browsing the web over a cellular network.
2. HTML5/CSS3 Coded – The theme is built using modern coding techniques, and performs great on modern smartphones. Building themes for mobile devices is great, as we can use advanced coding techniques without having to worry about Internet Explorer 
3. Unlimited Colorschemes – You can easily adjust the background color of the theme from within the plugin’s options page. The background is CSS based, which means you can change it to any color value without having to adjust any images.
4. Gallery Layout – HandHeld also offers a gallery layout which can come in handy if you would like to showcase a portfolio of your work. This gallery can be placed on the homepage, as well as in individual categories.
5. Plugin Options Page – Managing the plugin is easy using the plugin options page in your WordPress Dashboard.
I hope that everyone is excited to use the new design. Be sure to drop a comment and let us know what you think
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One more great niche covered. Demo looks great in my phone.
Love it Nick. Where’s the QR code? I made one and posted it to your FB wall.
No issues on Android with FF.
FYI: In dolphin (mobile browser) if I switch to full browser mode and then back to android(mobile) it kills the css and gives me raw content.
I added the QR code, thanks!
Nick:
FIrst off, I am very late in letting you know just how wonderful it is to be subscribed to your service. Thank you for being so professional and for saving me so much time.
I just installed the mobile plug-on on one of my sites. I have to say that it seems to work well. I’ve still got a bit of testing to do, but I thought I would take this time to let you know what a great job you’re doing.
I chuckled the first time I noticed that your first theme was named Blue Sky. From where I’m standing… I’d have to say that you are one of those rare few who actually made that blue sky dream a reality.
Thank you Nick. I’m really glad you created this opportunity for yourself and especially glad that you are kind enough to share your talent with us every day.
Thanks
Joe (Creatively.me)
I hope they will be able to create a theme for daily deals “group buying theme” to post daily deals. I wonder why they have not thought of it yet. Many theme sites already offering it. I am waiting a good one from Elegant Themes…
It is amazing to hear such appreciation for someones work from their clients. I work in TV advertising more than website promotion and from where I stand I want to start using Nicks’ work as much for it look and function as to be part of a satisfied and appreciative group.
Yes! I have been waiting for this for a while. There are a whole bunch of other plugins out there that say they will turn your site mobile, however they will not make them look “elegant” like your products do! Keep up the good work Nick!
AWESOME!
What method is the plug-in using to determine what is a “mobile browser?” It doesn’t work when viewing on my Palm Pre 2 phone (running webOS). Must mean my browser is too good
Thanks for letting us know. We will add this to the browser detection.
Also, it doesn’t load for Mobile Safari on the iPad too.
We chose not enabled it for the iPad. The normal theme designs perform fine on that size screen in my opinion. The small mobile theme is less intuitive.
Nice would it not be better to give us options in selecting which browsers we would like? Personally I would like to enable iPad mobile layout viewer as most sites don’t really show up too well on it.
What!!! Not for Ipad, what are you guys thinking, i really need it for Ipad
If you think that our websites look great on ipad, take a second look
http://www.jackjohansen.com
Hm….
We will add an option to enable the theme for the iPad in the next version.
Great, thanks Nick! webOS may be ‘down’ but it’s not out yet, LOL!
the plug-in using to determine what is a “mobile browser” use script which read user agent header from browser, simple is that.. I have no problem access from my Firefox in my pc the theme to see in proper way and test it in way for many mobile devices..if you are able to mask your browser as mobile device browser than the site will open without problem..
Doesn’t look like it’s working on my Blackberry?
We have updated the plugin and it should work with your Blackberry phone now.
Hey Nick
I’m checking it out on a Blackberry Bold.
Just some bugs after my first try:
The menu doesn’t work – nothing happens when I click on it.
The plus sign icon doesnt work to “Load more posts”.
Also, when I click on one of the gallery thumbnails further down, the display gets distorted.
Just a few things to maybe investigate a bit more
Love the theme layout and design by the way. Would love to make use of it as a lotta people use Blackberry’s outside the USA.
Bevan
BB user
Its awesome. I want it for my website. Please tell that how can i get it ? for my site.
Regards,
Just stick $17 in your disk drive and it’ll come in the mail in 4 – 6 weeks.
That is friggin hilarious Andrew.
You can sign up here to gain access to our themes: http://www.elegantthemes.com/join.php
Looks very beautiful and fast, but lacks flexibility. I cannot remove the “Welcome” section, and neither the Recent Work at the bottom.
Yea, good point. I am going to add options to remove these section in the plugin options page.
This is a theme that I’ve been waiting for. Thanks for your excellent work Nick!
Arigatou
Hello,
great job!!
is it possible from the plugin to hide some pages on the site?
Regards,
Yes, you can use the Appearances > Menus system to choose which items appear in your “Hand Held Menu”
thank you very much:)
getting a php error when the plugin is activated.
no no just update the home page of your site:)
Please try re-downloading the plugin and re-uploading it. I believe there was an issue with the first zip I uploaded.
That worked! Thanks Nick!
Super. Its working great on http://www.manfredconfidence.com and others…
Manfred
Very nice. I have just one question? Does this work with the short codes from your themes? I have one of your themes on my site now and wanted to add this. My last mobile theme didn’t work with your short codes so it looked ugly.
Great Work as always!
I love it! It looks great!! Thanks, Nick and team!
I have been stalking the blog waiting for this annoucnement, but now I’m sad
All my images are squeezed to fit the width instead of resized, I am forced to have a page above my blog posts instead of only showing posts. If I zero out the recent work fields, It’s still at the bottom of the page, but with a bunch of ugly question mark boxes. None of the initial posts have thumbnails, but if I tap “load more posts”, these new ones show the thumbnails and comment count. The mobile theme toggle at the bottom is huge and I have to scroll in order to see it all.
I am so bummed about this. Please fix these issues.
Good point, I will add an easier option for disabling the recent works section and homepage post tonight. As for the BG color issue, I have re-uploaded the plugin and the option should now be available.
Thanks! What about the photos issue? It makes the theme unusable.
The photos should work, so the issue is related to your particular setup. If you open a thread in the support forum we can better assist you.
Ok thanks.
This is great.
I’ve been looking for something that would work well, and this really does on most phones.
I though it was a nice touch to have the contactform appear on every page, but realized that it was the commentbox fields eventhough I have disabled commenting on most pages.
ps.: I’m using professional if that might have something to do with it.
My bad, I had activated commenting inside the plugin.
Works well on the HTC Desire. Good job!
It’s great to be able to offer a handheld option that has a similar design aesthetic to an ET-based layout. It looks fantastic on my iPhone and I like that I’ll be able to tweak it to a certain degree.
I’ll be delighted to start using this when I get my own website all sorted out again. All I have to do now is wait impatiently for the Sky theme to be released…
Awesome work, Nick. Looks beautiful on my Samsung Galaxy S browser.
May I suggest adding a QR code in addition to your bit.ly link? Seems appropriate for this theme.
I added a QR code
impressive!
Great work Nick!
Man I just wish I had a site to use it with!
Can’t wait to use it!
~kraymer
Awesome. Just yesterday I was looking for a mobile theme here. Great suprise when I logged on today! Now for some reason, the theme detects firefox on my PC as a mobile device…
How will shortcodes from the normal website be handled with the HandHeld theme?
Just curious…
awesome! great job !
Wow, now this is something I can definitely use! *going to play with this now*
Try to access it from my phone but it only appear this message
This theme preview is meant for mobile devices. Please visit this URL on your mobile phone to view the HandHeld design.
http://bit.ly/pz5H8m
I already click the link and it always go to the page
We have updated the theme to detect additional mobile browser. Please try again and let me know if you continue to experience the problem.
Still doesn’t detect on the Blackberry??!!
Please try again, I think it should be working now
Nick, I use a SonyEricsson handset – I see the same error – “This theme preview is meant for mobile devices. Please visit this URL on your mobile phone to view the HandHeld design. http://bit.ly/pz5H8m”
May I suggest something – instead of updating every kind of *browser* in your detection code, why not detect the screensize?
If the screensize is lower than 600px, it should point to the mobile version. If you look at the Twenty11 WP theme, you’d get some idea on this. While you’re there look at how images are dynamically resized on Twenty11 when screensize changes.
I would wait for your team to work on this further, before I put it on my business sites. Keep up the good work though – great start!
Am I understanding this correctly? Can I have a regular theme installed and this one at the same time and it will automatically detect which version to use based on the browser?
Yes, that is correct. You can enable this in addition to your normal theme. It is only displayed when someone visits your site on a mobile phone.
Brilliant!
Hi there … Just found an issue … When i am in “Home>> Full width” and i press in the Menu the option “Home” that send me to the web page for pcs …. =) .. Hope that this help =)
Hmmm, that’s strange. Can you open a thread in the support forum with more details about your Phone? We will look into the problem.
It really looks awesome for mobile phones!
Good Job!
Thanks Suren!
Nice theme specially homepage clean and attractive for every visitor. Nice work Nick
I liked this theme for mobiles
It would be easier to check demo if you include QRCode, which only now starts in US
I added a QR code to the demo page.
Awesome.
nice theme.
Impressive!
will be glad to have frequent mobile theme like this
Perhaps every 4 desktop theme comes a handheld theme
Hi,
I’m using Android 2.2 and saw that both, category and search pages appear in a weird way, without the header; most likely not what you intended.
Cheers!
Thanks for letting us know. The theme works well an the android devices I have tested, but I will look into this particular version more.
Looks great on the iPhone 4
my HTC Sensation is not recognized
Also i would like a html preview so i can see the actual html since I will be converting to something else than wp and I need a deme html I can save
I can do it for you
but in 22th Sep, because Im too busy to do it earlier heh
nokiko, I made small video how the theme actually looks like..the browser window is small to make it close looks like one of the android phone screens.. if the video doesn’t work for some reason you can download .flv file (15Megs) and watch it on your computer
link is here: http://bit.ly/oBnQCL
Hi
thanks for the effort but I meant a browsable html version
Although I have an account here i usualy save the demo site to html and then convert it to other cms systems to use for our clients
Hi,
it doesn’t work on my Windows Phone 7
I believe it should be working now on Windows 7 Phone. Please try the demo again and let me know if you have any further problems.
Looks great… love it!
My only question is how can I get the preview images on the “Recent Post” on my homepage?
You need to add the Thumbnail custom field to your posts, or use the Featured Image method for adding thumbnails to your posts.
Hello Nick, I started using it but it seems that it doesn’t manage ET short codes in a proper manner. It only put them away… I’ve used so many of your ET short codes to nicer my pages and now your mobile theme omit everything within short codes… that’s really sad. I would expect a conversion and doesn’t even resize embedded videos
In my Iphone looks perfect. Ill test it soon.
Hi Nick!
Thanks again for this theme.
I’ve got a couple of suggestion for you:
1) in the menu option it would be great to have an option to add the Icon and the “loading screen” that will be used once the page is added to the home of an iPhone.
2) The color customization isn’t enough. It’s possible to specify only the backgound color, but the texture and the menu are definitely “blueish”. For instance I’ve used a “brown” tint and the look of the header is not so good, since the squared texture is cyan or green. But we can modify this by ourselves.
3) The video post do not work. In my desktop theme (a modified Envisioned) I have a youtube video on top, while in the handheld the video is totally missing.
4) It should be possibile to deactivate the “Search bar”.
5) the page template do not work. That’s a pity. Will it be implemented in a future update. That would save a lot of work.
I haven’t tried all the shortcodes, but it would be usefull to have a list of working shortcodes and template features.
Thanks again.
Massimo
do it your self heh this theme works as dream.. color customization and search bar remove etc… – this is easy as mornings fart! This theme should be lightweight for mobile phones so what short-codes?
- stop smoking grass man, its killing your brain!
Looks awesome. I’ll have to give this theme a spin, been waiting for an HTML5/CSS3 (aka modernized) mobile theme. Thanks
Its really great. I was waiting for this. Nice addition as only it was missing from the pack.
I don’t think it’s working using IE on Windows Phone 7 either.
Thanks for letting us know. We will update the browser detection soon.
just tested on windowsphone7 OS and from browser IEmobile7 (asus galaxy phone) works..
Such a absolutely great ‘Elegant’ theme.
Good Job!!
Thanks
The ajax loader doesn’t work in my case. When I click on the button, the spinning wheel starts but nothing happens.
Also it’s I can’t change the menu. I’ve specified a menu as “handheld menu” in appeaerances->menu but nothing has changed.
Sorry for the trouble. If you could please open a thread in the support forum we will be happy to assist you.
I installed it on two of my websites last night. I love the way it looks on my phone, but the only problem is that when I activated the plugin, both of my websites were taking me to the mobile version of the website when I was accessing them from my laptop. Am I missing some checkbox? Has anyone else had this problem?
Strange, sorry about that. If you open a thread in the support forum we will be able to better assist you.
Whew! Worth the wait, this one will definitely be a keeper. Thanks Nick.
Thanks Lance, I am glad to hear that you like the new theme!
Thanks for the theme. I´ve been waiting for a theme like this. We should showcase our mobile sites based on this theme.
Great job Nick!
This would have been perfect for my site http://www.biyncctv.com if it recognizes the ET Short Codes. Further more I think it would be even better if we can change not only the header background color, but also the body background color.
Would be very glad if you could implement ET short code recognition. Should we expect this any time soon?
Fantastic job as always!
Unfortunately I don’t think that most of the shortcodeds would play nicely within the smaller design, but we will look into it.
Thanks for agreeing to look into it. I trust you’ll find a way to make the short codes work this handheld design
Lots of interest in this one Nick.
I’ll take a look over the weekend and post back how it goes.
Hey Nick!
I haven’t used the theme yet, but from your demo, it looks great on the Iphone 4. I’ll be downloading the theme tonight. Thanks for all of the amazing themes!
Nick….it looks amazing. Thanks again for another great product. I’m not going to be able to mess with it for about another week though. However, it appears as though you are promising to add several options/features/updates…that being said, do you think you will have added/changed what you plan on doing within that time frame…or should I just wait a little bit?
I’d be happy to help debug and give feedback, but as usual, your fanbase is huge and you seem to have plenty of feedback as it is.
Or…even better…since this theme/plugin seems to be such a huge hit, do you think that you could send out a newsletter to us ET Members when you’ve completed all of that as we all seem to be eager to download and play with the final release?
Just curious bro.
If you subscribe to the feed, you’ll get notified of anything Nick posts: http://www.elegantthemes.com/blog/feed
Hi Nick, nice work man, but the menu doesn’t work in htc chacha and my old nokia 5230 heh I tried under Firefox(linux) on my pc and aslo menu doesn’t work..been testing this theme under 70 mobile devices and 7 mobile OS-s with 3 versions back..all of them works with this theme even android 1.1 and Nokia 6100 (WAP phone)
Then I find out there is no menu.. (id=”main_menu_link” href=”#”)
there should be menu in ‘preview’ you know just to see how it looks like on mobile devices…
EDIT: Ah menu added, thanks Nick!
Another cool Plugin, I Think.
Thank you!
There might be an issue, I need you to please duplicate it and double check.
1) Accessing your demo link at:
http://bit.ly/pz5H8m
2) Mobile page gets displayed
3) Select “Menu”
4) Select “Blog”
5) Blog page will properly display.
6) Select “Menu”
7) Select “Home”
Device used: Nexus S with Android 2.3.6 (using default browser)
Mobile works with every selection you touch in “Menu”, it ONLY dies when “Home” is selected. If I close browser, reopen, and revisit the shortlink, then mobile is displayed (until I select “home”, and again the mobile version will die).
How do we turn emoticons off when submitting a comment?
That should be the number 8, not a smiley with glasses.
Hey Nick,
great work. I´ve just installed and started playing with it. Are you going to implement some kind of ads manager. It would be great if you do it.
I think this is the main thing to improve.
Some bugs here and there but this has great potential!
Some Features I believe however that are necessary for this to work.
- Customization of Menu (I don’t want every single page to be on it)
- Get first post as thumbnail
- Fix bug where thumbnail doesn’t come out.
- Fix bug where single post does not display (blank page)
Looking forward to this update!
NVM the customization of menu go to Appearances => Menu => Handheld Menu
Fantastic!
I just came across this and I can’t wait to try it out!
For your next mountain to climb, maybe you could come out with a righteous facebook fanpage theme. (not to be too greedy)
You are the gift that keeps on giving!
Big John
Great theme.
Looks great. Keep up the good work.
Tried going to the sample website above on my HTC Sensation 4G (T-Mobile) and it just keeps telling me the theme preview is meant for mobile devices and shows the link and QR code again. Even if I use the bit.ly address.
Update: Installed Firefox Mobile and it works with that.
Did some checking and it seems that the HTC Sensation 4G comes set to NOT display mobile versions of web pages by default!
I changed the setting and the mobile version loads fine.
I figured I’d post this in case anyone else has the same issue and doesn’t realize it’s set this way by default.
This is an awesome addition to the desktop theme package!
I tried out with an iPhone 4 and it looks really nice. I will be doing some tests on my sites very soon and will give feedback for sure.
Great job Nick:)
excellent, excellent work…. BUT any news on shortcodes working with the handheld theme? The vast majority of my content on website is between [box]… as a result my pages show up empty on the theme. Is there at least a way to code it so that the content of the div is show on page body?
many thanks in advance
Nick, I can’t seem to find the zip file when I download the theme. Am I missing something?
I tested this theme on my ipad and iphone and it’s very great… I know there will be more features in the future mobile theme by ET… Great work ET…
great job, thanks a lot desingers of the theme !
Is there a shortcode for a click to call button? Much needed for mobile.
thanks.
Hi Nick,
What a brilliant idea, well done!
Will this work with BuddyPress?
I’ve uploaded the plugin zip file and successfully activated, but when I click on settings I get this error:
Fatal error: Call to undefined function: get_submit_button() in /nfs/……/wp-content/plugins/handheld/handheld.php on line 285
I’ve install HandHeld on other sites and really like it. For some reason the submit button function isn’t allowing me to get to the settings page for this site. Please advice.
Please open a thread in the support forums so that our support team can assist you.
HI, Nick,
Just found out that this plugin (why do you call it a theme??) doesn’t support e-commerce…I’m going to have a shopping cart on my site; do you plan on providing that functionality in the future so that we call sell on mobile devices, too?
Awesome! Will check this out!
Does this theme support adsense for mobile ?
I love this day-in-the-life type journal! Very cool and who better to spend a glorious 13minutes watching than Georgina!
Hey, my menu also doesn’t open, and I set it in the “Handheld Menu” dropbox to be used… Please help.
this is an awesome theme, i had no idea that such elegant themes had mobile devices, i will definitely make use of it.
Looks very beautiful and fast, but lacks flexibility. I cannot remove the “Welcome” section, and neither the Recent Work at the bottom.
Looks great. Keep up the good work.
I am wondering how I can get the startup screen to work? It just loads safari and opens the main page.