By joel_guesclin on

I'm turning over in my mind the possibility of making one of my web sites (specifically in Japanese) available on mobile phones, and would be very glad to hear if anybody else has done anything like this.

Here are a few thoughts about requirements:

  • Since the site should display both on a workstation and on a mobile phone, there would have to be some way of detecting which the visitor to the site is using.
  • Is it possible just to use CSS or is there some difference in the XHTML?
  • The site would be pretty simple - but the most important feature would be a forum into which visitors should be able to type using their mobiles
  • Can anyone recommend a particular handset simulator?
  • Are there any specific issues related to Japanese?

Any ideas or pointers would be welcome!

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

Phillip Mc’s picture

Phillip Mc commented

I maybe wrong..but i seem to remember seeing a mobile theme in the downloads section before. Haven't tried it but it might be a good starting point for you.

http://drupal.org/project/mobile

phil

basicmagic.net’s picture

basicmagic.net commented

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15+ years Drupal, 20+ years web.
http://basicmagic.net

jamesJonas’s picture

jamesJonas commented

I have just launched a prototype site at http://FatAtlas.mobi. This targets a smartphone platform under WebKit. I'm using phone emulators for the initial test design. Details are here: http://drupal.org/node/192183

Theme Development

I took my current theme, whitejazz by RoopleTheme.com, and forked it to mobilejazz. I then started to hack the css to fit it into a mobile platform. My goal was to ensure a common user experience between my standard website platform and my mobile platform.

Monday - SDK drop by Android
Tuesday - Android: Ported FatAtlas.com and Launched as FatAtlas.mobi, testing it using the Android Emulation inside the Google Android SDK kit. (good rendering, unstable during loads, needs backend debug tools, which may still be hidden somewhere in the SDK)
Wednesday - iPhone: emulation testing for iPhone using web based tool. (best navigation, very easy to setup and run, next I'll look at software emulations)
Thursday - Nokia Emulator Test (fast, medium navigation, log-in failure, great backend tools for debug)

The mobile website still requires substantial UI customization, but for the most part all these cellphone emulators give you a good idea of how your Drupal website may look and feel inside a mobile phone.

Drupal Mobile

Under the WebKit browser platform, porting Drupal sites seems much more viable. I would also note that the browser market for mobile phones with high end features (css, javascript...) is very hot right now. Opera Mini 4.0 and Firefox may also need to be added to ones list of test mobile environments. The core issue is that Drupal can create a robust mobile experience today with the current crop of more fully featured browsers running on the more robust smartphone platforms. There is work to be done in making Drupal more mobile friendly, which include: page design to fit on smaller screen footprints, smarter loading of css/javascript/images, use of ajax remote calls for calling page elements on an as needed basis, incremental page loads of long documents and most important to this thread, themes that take advantage of this features.

MobileJazz Theme

RoopleTheme.com is the creator of WhiteJazz, which I have forked from their code base to create MobileJazz. After I have thinned out the theme to a more mobile friendly footprint I'll take a look at how it may be released.

James

FatAtlas.com

hakeem’s picture

hakeem commented

I need a mobile theme that auto-detects the mobile browser.

--
www.hakeem-sy.org

--
www.hakeem-sy.com

Resident Geek’s picture

Resident Geek commented

The only thing that limits whether or not a smart phone can see it, is the formatting.
Since php is server side script, it will return HTML. As long as it's formatted for the phone, it will work fine.
So yes... Drupal could be made to work for a phone. As to whether or not someone has done it yet, I don't know.

jabba_29’s picture

jabba_29 commented

The accessibility module can display content device dependently -
http://drupal.org/project/accessibility

It uses very basic device detection, chooses a theme accordingly and
then splits content into smaller pieces if required.

There are a few very basic themes for mobile devices on skiffie for v4.7x and v5x -
these include empty style-sheets, but you should be able to catch the basics
from the templates themselves.

I am working on a mobile theme for v6 at the moment,
once I have figured out the answers to this question
I hope to start development work on the actual module again.

Regards

Jamie

Making Drupal Mobile

ruadhan’s picture

ruadhan commented

We use Drupal for our developer's site http://dev.mobi

We outline how to do it in an article Creating mobile sites drupal using multisites.

jabba_29’s picture

jabba_29 commented

Hi,

I have kind of discontinued development work at the moment on the module side of things,
but I have created a mobile theme that:

breaks down content into smaller chunks
sends the correct content type for mobile devices
changes the cache so that new pages shouldn't be called too often.

Screen-shots for accessibility module
Bluemobi theme

Regards

Jamie

Making Drupal Mobile

twom’s picture

twom commented

See my blog for a possible solution/example:
http://mobiledrupal.com/content/make-your-drupal-blog-mobile

The example uses a combination of automatic adaptation and manual authoring.

I am working on a couple of modules (http://mobiledrupal.com/content/mobile-device-detection-module) that assist in managing your mobile site.

sp_key’s picture

sp_key commented

Don't you need somehow to see mobile phone capabilities and render content accordingly?
For example what if you want to stream video? How do you know what codecs each phone is capable of?
What about Image thumbnails and header images?
I doubt it's just theming.

As far as I understand you need some kind of database with phone specs like wurfl (http://wurfl.sourceforge.net/), some code to read the user agent of each phone and some realtime image resizer to serve images accordingly.

Sp.

tallsimon’s picture

tallsimon commented

Mobile tools can use wurfl among other things
http://drupal.org/project/mobile_tools

mdfaizu’s picture

mdfaizu commented

Hi,

What are common problems associated with Drupal and Japanese mobile, does drupal sites have any work around for this?

It seems mobile companies in Japan have developed specific browers that do not support Drupal?

Thanks
Faiz

mdfaizu’s picture

mdfaizu commented

Hi,
What are common problems associated with Drupal and Japanese mobile, does drupal sites have any work around for this?
It seems mobile companies in Japan have developed specific browers that do not support Drupal?
Thanks
Faiz

jrdwhitney’s picture

jrdwhitney commented

Here is a Mobile Phone Emulator; it does not have all of the newest mobile phones but it works pretty well.
http://www.mobilemoxie.com/handset-emulators/phone-emulator/

signal121booster’s picture

signal121booster commented

Don't you need somehow to see mobile phone capabilities and render content accordingly?
For example what if you want to stream video? How do you know what codecs each phone is capable of?
What about Image thumbnails and header images?
I doubt it's just theming.
http://cellphoneboosterstore.com/