Today’s Question: What’s the use of WordPress 2.9′s new ‘post thumbnail’ feature if I’m using an older theme with its own thumbnail hack?

Answer: If you’re a user (as opposed to a theme developer) there’s a big upside to WordPress’ new thumbnail feature — that is, if you care about people visiting your site from an iPhone or other Web-enabled smartphones.

It’s quite possible you’re already using a WordPress theme that automatically generates a thumbnail from images you upload to accompany a blog post or page (check out how I’ve implemented it on the home page of Blue Seraph Productions). So why should you care if your theme already takes care of thumbnails?

A HACK WordPress themes that created thumbnails for you did so courtesy of a hack concocted by your theme’s developer; thumbnails weren’t a built-in feature of WordPress up til now. As of version 2.9, WordPress includes thumbnails as part of its core functions. Great, right? It is for developers of new themes, or those who update their old themes, to take advantage of it.

Where this makes a difference for a regular WordPress user like you and me is what smartphone visitors to our sites see. Thanks to the amazing plugin, WPtouch, your site becomes smartphone-friendly without you having to write a lick of code. A recent revision to WPtouch took advantage of the post-thumbnail feature, allowing you to replace calendar icons on your mobile-version homepage with a thumbnail image. The result: a less generic-looking version of your mobile Web site.

BEFORE AND AFTER The combination of WordPress 2.9′s thumbnail feature and WPtouch gives your mobile Web site a brighter, more individualized look.

Next: How to do it yourself »

The Cosmic Sitcom™ is making the leap from iWeb to WordPress, so pardon all the chaos as content gets migrated over the next week or so.

Making the transition easier were these handy directions for importing my posts from the old site using RSS. Images didn’t quite make it over on their own, so I’ve had to import those manually.

I’m really liking the WordPress theme for the new site, Visual, by Rubiqube at Theme Forest. Not everything works out of the box but it’s a beautiful theme — newsy but with plenty of white space to make scanning for content easy — and it’s well documented, with support forums that have so far addressed every issue I’ve encountered.

As many times as I’ve done domain name changes, they’re never easy; something’s always effed up, so if you encounter an error, please let me know.

NOSTALGIC for the old site while this one’s under construction? It’s still viewable here.