AMP: Ready for Testing

Update: we’ve adjusted our timing and are now planning to enable AMP on WordPress.com near the end of February, to coincide with Google’s release.

A few months ago we announced our participation in the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project, an exciting new open-source initiative which aims to provide mobile-optimized content that loads instantly, everywhere.

Since then, many of you have been testing the plugin in your local environments (thank you!), and today we’re ready for you to test AMP on your production sites as well, ahead of its official launch on WordPress.com ~~next week~~ near the end of February.

To enable AMP on your WordPress.com VIP site, simply add the following to your functions.php file (customers on our VIP Go platform should add the plugin to their plugins directory):

add_filter( 'amp_is_enabled', '__return_true', 100 );

The plugin ships with a minimal default template, and we’ve built in a number of filters so your developers can customize the experience to better match your site—read more in our documentation.

We’ll be enabling AMP by default for everyone on WordPress.com at the end of February (this does not affect sites on VIP Go); if you’d prefer not to support AMP on your site, you can proactively opt-out by adding the following to your functions.php file:

add_filter( 'amp_is_enabled', '__return_false', 100 );

As always, if you have any feedback or bug reports, please open a ticket—or feel free to log them as issues on Github.

BlackBerry 10 Device Support

We’ve made a minor change to the mobile user agent detection function that now properly recognizes the new forthcoming BlackBerry 10 devices and redirects them to the mobile theme if that’s enabled.

For VIPs running on WordPress.com, no action is required, BlackBerry 10 devices will receive the same “smart” theme that both iOS and Android devices are being served. Learn more about the BB10 user agent string.

If you run into any issues or have any questions about mobile themes, please let us know.

Mobile Themes Widget

We’ve added a new widget to the VIP Dashboard to give you a better view into the mobile options available and enabled on your sites.

At a glance you can tell whether mobile and iPad are enabled and which themes are currently active for each group of devices.

All WordPress.com sites come with three mobile themes (WP Touch, WP Mobile, and Onswipe), all of which can be easily customized to your own needs. You also have the flexibility to design and build mobile themes from scratch as well. Here is just a sampling of VIPs with custom themes: