Posted by robertDouglass on May 30, 2006 at 2:12pm
What Drupal sites target mobile devices and what are the programming issues involved? Do we have any documentation covering how to create Drupal sites for mobile devices? Who owns a mobile device and uses it for surfing the web? It is all new to me and I'd really appreciate some overview of where things stand. Finally, from a money perspective, does it pay to offer a mobile version of your site?
Comments
Q and D mobile site
Robert, I put together a quick mobile site for BlufftonToday a couple of weeks ago;
http://wap.blufftontoday.com/
It's an unfinished work, following the principle of "launch, then fix."
WML is dead, fortunately. This is XHTML-MP, which is designed for the typical mobile browsers on current phones (S60, Openwave, Microsoft Smartphone). About the only thing unusual about XHTML mobile profile is support for a href="tel:+1-843-815-0800" for click-to-dial.
I didn't mobile-enable the current site. Instead, I wrote some simple PHP scripts that grab RSS from Drupal (and XML from a couple of other sources, such as the YellowAdvantage database). Transform, output.
I believe the key issue with mobile services is: What's useful in a mobile context? Simply creating XHTML-MP templates for a reasonably mature existing site would just overwhelm users with irrelevant choices. The mobile site's architecture should be different from a "sitting in my living room" website.
What kind of traffic do you get? Or is it too soon?
What kind of user agents do you see showing up? How is your site found by mobile devices? I like the mini-version. More of the internet should be like that!
No real traffic yet
I'm not sure but I don't think the site has been announced to the weblog community by the folks in Bluffton. Looks like I need to make a phone call. :-)
Here is a link to the .mobi best-practices document. I think the .mobi TLD is a bad idea, but the best practices make good sense.
http://pc.mtld.mobi/documents/dotmobi-Switch-On!-Web-Browsing-Guide.html
Clean code
Roland and I have been doing a lot of investigating with mobile....at least in North America.
WAP is the lowest common denominator that works with all phones in NA...since most don't have phones that support rich browsers. BUT....no one with WAP phones actually uses it to surf the web. It's the smartphone/more capable phone users that actually have data phones and browse the web. I suspect it is similar in Europe from what I have seen (and, for example, in Belgium, data plans are non-existant, whereeas in Italy 90GB of data is 30EU).
Nokia just released the S60 Browser based on the Apple WebKit/Konqueror codebase. It renders full XHTML, and they are going to add full Javascript support.
So, what can you do to support mobile? Clean code. There are a few other tricks, like a link jump bar at an alternative URL, less use of background images, etc. (i.e. implemented at m.domain.com -- keep those URLs short!).
Does it pay? Nope. SMS integration is killer. Upcoming.org sends SMS notification of events, as does Google Calendar. You can even generate logins using SMS -- enter in your phone number as "user ID", get sent an SMS password, and you're in.
Hope that helps...
I've been tracking this for about a year.
For what its' worth, I built a multi-site last year with the second site being a mobile site. Same modules and database, just flipped the theme. I used a trimmed down wire frame theme, I think I got it from Ber. Traffic was slow and most of it was non-mobile.
But since then I have been tracking the subject. Its still a young market place, very young. As a non-programmer there are few tools available to build a slick site.
I was browsing the net the other day and noticed that Joomla has a WAP module now. Though pound for pound I feel Drupal kicks the heck out of anything else out there for site development. Even more so, now with the release of 4.7. But I might load Joomla and the WAP up, just to see what the maintainer is thinking and how he is formatting and presenting his data.
I feel that once the smoke clears and a lot of the Drupal modules get out of CVS, you’re going to see more programmers and site developers switching over to Drupal. Some of these people are going to be interested in mobile websites. I see it coming, but somewhere around the time of Drupal 4.9 or Drupal 5.0.
I sort of look at this subject, like email was 15 years ago, everyone wanted it – even if they didn’t know what it was or have a use for it. They wanted it because it sounded cool and now today grandma uses it daily.
People are turning off their landlines and just using their cell phone as their primary phone more and more daily. There was a published report last month and the amount of people turning off their landlines was an interesting number. Sure some of that was VOIP and such. Cell phones features and memory are growing every month.
The Big 3 SE’s are pushing mobile sites, but with the fight the 3 of them are about to start, I’m not sure if it will help or hurt the emergence of mobile on the internet.
I also think WAP will die
I also think WAP will die off. However, I think there is a small demand for low bandwidth sites (READ: not WAP sites).
I use Pocket IE all the time now since I've got a Windows Mobile phone. I wished I had a low-bandwidth solution for Drupal with stripped graphics (except for maybe the logo), stripped javascript, and perhaps a narrow content column.
Sounds really easy to do. It's on my to-do list.
However, I think a lot of people are expecting a WAP ready site when they talk about Drupal sites for mobile devices.
Just remember that a growing number of mobile devices can browser the "regular" non-WAP internet.
Isn't this largely a CSS issue?
I mean, if the code is clean XHTML, shouldn't having a mobile version of a site be nearly as simple as serving up an alternate style-sheet (ala. print) for the media type? I haven't actually designed for mobile devices, so maybe I'm just drinking the A List Apart web standards kool aid on this one.
What else needs to be though of, aside from the alternate style-sheet and accessibility? Hopefully I'm not completely in left field on this one.
Problems with drinking the Kool-Aid
There are a couple of problems with the AListApart approach, one technical, one having to do with human behavior.
The technical problem is that the Kool-Aid drinkers live in a happy theoretical world while real mobile phone users have devices with numeric keypads, audio circuits, tiny screens, unpredictable memory restrictions and varying levels of nonsupport for actual standards.
Many mobile sites today are heavily "chunked" -- output of anything longer than a few sentences is paginated. I think that's going to disappear over time as the center of gravity shifts to phones with reasonable RAM, and speeds continue to increase.
But the utility of keypad access isn't going to go away, and unfortunately you have to code it inline with some XHTML extensions. Ditto click-to-call (which conventional Web browsers arguably ought to support if something like Skype is locally installed).
The human behavior problem is simply that people have different needs depending on their contexts: Stuck in traffic looking up a phone number, sitting at a bar waiting for someone to show up, trying to look up a movie listing quickly, etc., versus parked in front of a TV or in front of a desktop browser. Making an existing website capable of being rendered on a mobile browser isn't a bad thing but it doesn't optimize for human needs.
What I'd like is to do both, possibly pulling from common data. Once, "the whole thing" if you have time and attention. The other, "mobile portal" for quick access to mobile utility.
Not really in left field
Emphasie on clean XHTML that is also only using the XHTML Basic subset:
no frames
no scripts
no nested tables
no inline style
on basic forms (no accept attributes, optgroups, fieldsets, buttons, etc - http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-modularization/abstract_modules.html#s_sforms...)
bare-bones tables (no borders, cellpadding or margins, col, colgroup, tbody, etc...http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-modularization/abstract_modules.html#sec_5.6.)
Basically, if you stick to semantically correct, pared-down HTML and do your styling and layout with CSS, you should be ok for any device, but no guarantees...
Juanfe
Web server on your phone
This is not directly related, but you may find it interesting nontheless. I found out today that some of the Symbian platform phones like the N70 can run Apache! Add PHP, and some kind of database, and then we're not talking Drupal and mobile phones, but Drupal on mobile phones.
Minus a few technical issues...
Basic Mobile Versions
Hi there,
Just found this group today, so thought I could see if I can contribute.
I have actually posted in this thread already,
but haven't gotten much (any) feedback from it. *
I had to amend the content-type to text/html instead of application/xhtml+xml -
the Javascript didn't work :)
The example urls linked are actually for a site using 4.5 or 4.6,
can't remember which exactly - did it a long time ago.
It basically limits the amount of content dependant on browsing device.
Going to the main url, the script "should" detect the device.
It uses one code base and additional files are called through changes made in "settings.php".
I had to hack at quite a few additional files to do this - totally undocumented by me :)
I am currently developing a module to do the same thing with 4.7 - in testing phases.
Modifications made to "common inc" only.....
However, all interaction - eg: forms etc., have been denied to mobile users at the moment,
as most of the form code etc. won't work on a device
- certainly not in WML where you need special wap code.
Again, content that can be seen is limited to teasers really,
but unless you have seperate content for mobile devices, then what else can you do?
Any thoughts, comments on this approach?
(EDIT: sorry, this was supposed to be at the bottom of this thread - not right at the top of the page)
Regards
Jamie
skiFFie - Making Drupal Mobile
WURFL & Drupal
Hi,
Has anybody heard of WURFL (http://wurfl.sourceforge.net/)? WURFL is the de facto standard open source device description repository.
Has anyone considered integrating WURFL with Drupal for device detection and multi-serving?
Ruadhan.
Mobile version of a Drupal site
I'm using Drupal to manage action sports locations, web cams and local shops. For the mobile version, I just hand-coded simple XHTML Mobile pages that access the Drupal database.
Here is a sample page for Stevens Pass, a local ski resort outside Seattle...
http://mobile.ridertech.com/?spot=13
Personally, I think this year is going to be a break out year for mobile web.