Seeking mobile solution for our school Drupal site

We encourage users to post events happening in the community to the community events group on https://www.drupal.org.
kassissieh's picture

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?

jpamental's picture

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

jasonh's picture

Kudos --- really impressed how this scales down/up on different resolutions!

Thanks!

jpamental's picture

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

staceyrice's picture

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!

jpamental's picture

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?

bonobo's picture

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:

So that's just using one theme?

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

Hey Bill-

jpamental's picture

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?

bonobo's picture

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...