Posted by kassissieh on January 12, 2012 at 9:45pm
We would like to develop either a mobile app or a mobile theme for our Drupal 6 website to provide users with easy access to specific content (directory, map, news, calendar, athletics events, photo galleries). Can you recommend a development company that does a great job with this sort of work? Thank you.
Comments
How about a Responsive theme?
Hi Richard-
We've created our own Zen sub theme that's responsive - and works great to make your whole site accessible on a mobile theme. You can have a look at http://www.bayviewacademy.org or http://www.emmawillard.org as examples (we've launched 4 or 5 others as well). I know we spoke about this a while back but maybe now's a better time to talk about it. Regardless - we're happy to help!
Cheers,
Jason
Jason Pamental
[ @jpamental ]
Kudos --- really impressed
Kudos --- really impressed how this scales down/up on different resolutions!
Thanks!
It's been a great learning experience, and we get better with each one. Combining a responsive approach with LESS.css or SASS/Compass is an amazingly flexible/quick way to develop. We've had a great response so far.
Jason
Jason Pamental
[ @jpamental ]
So that's just using one
So that's just using one theme? I'd be interested to learn how to implement something like this, especially with Zen. It looks rad. Let me know if you'd be able to throw me a couple pointers.
Sure thing!
Hi Stacey-
I'm happy to pass along my Zen theme starting point - but it does require LESS.css. Have you worked with that before? (If not - I highly recommend it)
There are also a number of other Drupal themes to start with (Bill's among them, though I haven't tried Terrain yet personally) that are responsive 'out of the box' and might be worth getting to know. Omega is also really solid and well-developed.
Feel free to ping me directly if you're interested.
Cheers,
Jason
Jason Pamental
[ @jpamental ]
Is there a release on d.o?
Hello, Jason,
Have you released any of this on d.o? If not, I'd strongly recommend making a sandbox project to share the code out - the more eyes going over code, the better. The requirement for less.css could be documented on the project page, and in a readme.txt - it's a pretty well known library.
RE Terrain - we have an upgrade coming to that shortly; there we a new 7.x beta of Hexagon that was released a couple weeks back, and we'll be updating Terrain to make full use of Hex as the base theme.
Hello, Stacey - this article on responsive design is somewhat old (in web terms :)) and I apologize in advance if you've already seen it: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/responsive-web-design
RE:
Have you worked with subthemes? Using subthemes lets you control what elements of the base theme get inherited, and can really speed up development time. Getting a solid base theme can also help reduce the hassles of cross-browser compatibility testing. I hope this helps, and again, sorry if these are things you have seen already.
Cheers,
Bill
FunnyMonkey
Hey Bill-
I hadn't put it up on d.o. just because it wasn't all that tidy and requires that you work with LESS - though more than that it's just lack of familiarity with setting up projects! I need to do that though as it's useful and I'd rather more people actually get something from it.
Thanks for the nudge, and congrats on the development of Terrain - I'll have to check that out too!
Cheers,
Jason
Jason Pamental
[ @jpamental ]
Responsive or mobile?
Hello, Richard,
We have built and released a responsive theme - you can get it at d.o at http://drupal.org/project/terrain
The question of whether you want an app, a mobile theme, or a responsive theme is definitely one that straddles design and strategy concerns.
Long term, building a responsive theme will get you more return on your investment, as you don't need to sacrifice content based on a user's device, and, done right, a responsive theme will work on standards-compliant browsers.
Terrain has both D6 and D7 versions.
We have a writeup on Terrain at http://funnymonkey.com/intro-to-terrain-hexagon-based-responsive-starter...
FunnyMonkey