New member and new mobi

Posted by CMSjunkie on March 6, 2009 at 4:12am

Hi mobi'ers,

I just joined the mobi group in search of help and resources.

The first place I went, was Showcase. Am I using it correctly? I don't see a single site there. Are we shy or am I using it wrong?

I have so many questions and not a clue, about what mods I can use on mobi's

examples:

1) Can I use mods that use jquery - a lot of the new mods use jquery

2) Same for Ajax

3) what type of menu system works best

4) mod's that should be avoided

5) mods that are perfect fits for mobi

6) paging

7) page length

8) menu length

I am also a member of mobiForge, wow some great info over there

I have tremendous respect for the members of the Drupal community and I have been witness to some really great achievements from the group as a whole. I also believe Drupal can be the foundation for just about any type of website. It has to be..... these days who has to time, energy or brainpower to learn and master more than one CMS.

I know more people would like to try to build their first mobi, but like me .... don't have a clue where to start.

In light of all the above, I have decided to do this mobi project Drupal style and invite others to comment, offer suggestions and feedback. Even I as type this, it sounds a bit corny or silly. Also, I have no idea how this group is going to view this approach.

But I figure if this approach helps just one other webmaster get a Drupal mobi site up and running, its a win for all of us.

Look for thread "Building afstations.mobi" from the ground up.

http://afstations.mobi is something I believe in and my way of giving something back.

The website is to be a resource website.

AF is short for "Alcohol Fuel" not my first choice for a name, but after over 50 failed new domain name searches --- I decided it will work.

The long name would be Alcohol Fuel Stations, which will provide a directory of afstations for the 50 US states. I considered making it international, but this is going to be a learning curve as it is.

If anyone feels making this project public is not appropriate, please comment and I will pull it down.

Comments

Building afstations.mobi" from the ground up

Posted by CMSjunkie on March 6, 2009 at 4:26am

(please see post http://groups.drupal.org/node/19756 )

Druapl 6.9 (had mysqli issue with 6.10)
Themes: "Garland" to build and work in, ".mobi" when ready to go live
Shared Server
PHP 5.2.x (PHP running as FastCGI)
mySQL: 5

1) load drupal 6.9
2) set-up basics
3) decide which modules will help and be required

Hi Jwells, This looks great

Posted by twom on March 6, 2009 at 4:47am

Hi Jwells,

This looks great what you are doing.
I am currently at Drupalcon, and when talking to fellow developers I hear that there are almost no clients asking for Mobile.
So, that's probably why there are no showcases.

I am working on a blog (www.mobiledrupal.com) where I try to bundle some resources, or present some ideas on going mobile.
I will publish in two weeks some helpful modules that I have been demonstrating here at Drupalcon.

So to help you with your questions:
- avoid javascript, unless you are specifically targetting iphone or other high end devices
- the same for Ajax
- If you rely on javascript, to do core functionality, your site will break on mobile devices. If you have a fallback scenario, your site will gracefully degrade.
- Menu systems can be for example select lists or plain small menu's (check m.deredactie.be to see how menus can work).
- and of course you have to try to add paging to long chunks of content and avoid too much menu items.
- try to reduce size of your page (no necessary css, html, javascript)
- adapt your content (e.g. images, tables) to the device

If you take a look at my presentation http://mobiledrupal.com/content/mobile-strategies-drupal you get an overview on what I am working on to assist developers going mobile.

Feel free to contact me if you want an early release of the module!
Are you on Drupalcon?

Tom

PS: small drupal showcase tderycke.mobiledrupal.mobixx.eu

Building afstations.mobi" from the ground up (part 2)

Posted by CMSjunkie on March 6, 2009 at 4:49am

Loading Modules:

Pathauto
Tax Manager (need to load 50 states - fast)
CCK
Views
Global redirect
HTMLawed filter

Notes:

a) decided to use long version of State names for SEO
b) will work "Alcohol Fuel" or actaully "alcohol-fuel" into URL path names using Pathauto
c) will need a custom node (addresses for stations) building with CCK
d) create role "staff" for admin - will give all rights to everything and assign to #1 user
e) setup new filter as default
f) setup "user settings" to "Only site administrators can create new user accounts."

thanks

Posted by CMSjunkie on March 6, 2009 at 4:53am

Hi Tom,
Thanks for the pointers and feedback.

I wasn't sure how this was going to be received.

Have fun at Show and Tell

Building afstations.mobi" from the ground up (part 3)

Posted by CMSjunkie on March 6, 2009 at 5:08am

First challenge

I have just recently learned I should be using XHTML-MP.

Drupal would do this via an "input filter"

I see we don't yet have a XHTML-MP filter and I don't have a clue on how to build one.

I will use the HTMLawed filter until a better solution appears.

Question to group:
Is there a better (tighter) filter to use instead?

Building afstations.mobi" from the ground up (part 4)

Posted by CMSjunkie on March 7, 2009 at 4:34am

Created 2 Vocabs

a) Fuel type
b) States (bring locale to project)

I wanted to take States a bit deeper; State, County, City. But that would make a huge list to choose from and without using HS (because it uses jquery) I consider this a bit messy.

Considered using Zip code, but who knows what Zip code they are in while they are driving, same with area code.

So this leaves me with Long & Lat (GEO/GPS) to work with. Not a bad option, lots of power and tools in this area lately. But this is my first Long/Lat project so I with have to spend some time reviewing these modules.

Yahoo or Google Map should prove useful. I feel it would also be very useful to have a Radius feature -- example: show me all afstations within 100 miles.

If anyone has experience here.. suggestions are welcomed and might save me a bit of review time.

Notes: Disabled and Removed Tax Manager - no longer needed now that States are loaded.

Building "afstations.mobi" from the ground up (part 5)

Posted by CMSjunkie on March 7, 2009 at 4:42am

Forgot to mention.

The Map & Long/Lat modules I will be reviewing will need to work with CCK, as I plan on using CCK to build my Station addresses.

How is your site going? Did

Posted by twom on March 20, 2009 at 11:05pm

How is your site going? Did you make any progress on the location based service? Would be happy to see what your results are.
Did you find a drupal module that lets you handle locations (POI : points of interest) and make searching on ZIP code easy?

I have a question, you mentioned that u will need drupal filters to convert to xHTML-MP . In my understanding filters only filter node content. And they don't interact with the theming of the Drupal site?

Tom

I'm a bit stuck

Posted by CMSjunkie on April 12, 2009 at 4:51am

please excuse the delay, couple of things

1) This is a slide project, meaning I have to squeeze it in between other things.

2) I'm a bit stuck with the Location task - so many darn choices. I just made a test site and I guess I will weed through the different modules.

I know what I would like to see and use, just not sure yet on how to get there.

Location, is very new to me.

I have found a pretty good example.

It's called earth 911 dot com

I like the way they have zip, address, city or state all in one box

I like the way they search on keywords - also all in one box

from the best I can tell its a WP site using Google Maps and Tele Atlas

I should be able to do this with all the modules we have and maybe even improve keywords cross reference with our structure

note: image attached

suggestions from group welcomed

better image of map

Posted by CMSjunkie on April 12, 2009 at 4:56am

I would like to do the text and the map.

Text listing should be easy with Views module