By Wouter Van den Bosch on

Hey all,

I am currently building my iPhone development skills and I'd like to make my time as useful as possible. Since I'm apt enough at Drupal development I figured it'd be nice to combine both skills and do something useful for the Drupal community. Hence I'd like to run this idea across some fellow Drupaleers to make sure that I'm building something really worthwhile.

Case : As a developer I often end up being the webmaster of Drupal sites I set up. Being on the go a lot I get quite a number of mails with questions to add a user here and there, enable a page here or there, remove a comment or some other menial task. Even though people could just do that themselves in many cases, as a webmaster you still end up doing a lot of those things.

So far I've been either doing this at home or, when on the go, load the site on my iPhone's Safari browser and make my changes from there. The latter does the trick eventually, but loading an entire Drupal template onto my iPhone isn't always the best experience. The iPhone is nice for website consumption, but less for interactivity (at least if you're as impatient as I am). Not every Drupal website comes with a nice alternative mobile theme.

Proposal : An iPhone webmaster app that allows a webmaster to create one or more website profiles and manage them from a native app environment. Working with native controls and just loading data, will probably make the entire experience a lot faster than loading entire pages in Safari.

Let's be honest, I won't be building an entire Drupal for Iphone app here, but I could at least make a first move at a light-weight Drupal management app.

What I'd like to hear from you is:

1) Is this a good investment of my time? Or would most people just be as happy without an app like this?
2) Is there maybe an ongoing, similar project that I've missed and might as well hook up with ?
3) If your answer to my first question was 'yes', what sort of features would you like to see first in such an app ?

Let me know what you think,

Best,

Wouter

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x, Drupal 7.x

Comments

khalor’s picture

khalor commented

There's an existing effort to develop something along these lines... iDrupal. We've yet to see a beta or any kind of working app on the iPhone itself, but the work on it is open source and can be seen here. Not sure when work was last done it, we've been waiting a while.

That aside, a Drupal-managing iPhone app is certainly something I'd make use of, and I'm sure there are others (as evidenced by the subscribers to iDrupal)

Wouter Van den Bosch’s picture

Wouter Van den Bosch commented

Thanks for the heads up there Khalor.

I've pinged the project's maintainers to see what's going on there at the moment. Their last commit was about 44 weeks ago, so I have my fears. Nevertheless, they might have a good basis to work on.

pumpkinkid’s picture

pumpkinkid commented

While I in no mean attempt to belittle your en-devour, I have to ask you why would there be a benefit in creating an Drupal app vs actually making a module that creates a iphone friendly administrative theme?

The reasoning behind this question is simply the fact that the only real benefits would be an app that could only perform mundane core tasks... vs if you created a way to make your Drupal install run with lesser load times, you'd have full access to the admin functionality...

I'm just adding to the discussion, I'd like to see if there is a reason I am unable to find...

ckreutz’s picture

ckreutz commented

Either would be a great thing. Subscribing!

holeyness’s picture

holeyness commented

Check out drupad it's priced at $5 but it'd better then nothing
http://drupad.com