Joomla on a PDA, Smartphone etc.
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- Raymond Basso
- Sr. Rocketeer
- Posts: 165
- Thanks: 1
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One problem I have with Joomla web pages is viewing them on a PDA. A growing number of people use the devices and when you look at a Joomla web page on one of them it looks terrible. I personally use a Motorola Q and and these sites are almost unreadable.
Is the cause of this the design of Joomla or the templates? I just had a client try to look at a web page I am working on for him and it was a mess. Is there a way to have the template recognize that it's being viewed with one of these devices and send them to a simpler version of the web page?
Ray
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- GollumX
- Elite Rocketeer
- Posts: 2817
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mobile.xe-media.ch/
I have no idea what this is.. haven't had the time to even read about it. Not sure whether it is an extension. - Say no to Internet Explorer 6.
twitter.com/mark_up
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I would say that design plays a huge role in whether a site works on mobile devices or not. Try playing around with different simplified templates, single column with simple navigation, and see if that helps.
mobile.xe-media.ch/It's actually just a template that's been skinnied down to make it work better on a mobile device. You can download it for free from xe-media here:
I have no idea what this is.. haven't had the time to even read about it. Not sure whether it is an extension.
www.xe-media.ch/software/downloads/xe_mobile.zip
Josxp has another template designed with PDAs in mind:
www.josxp.com/content/view/49/51/
This site has a module that is supposed to create WAP compatible items for your content:
www.googirama.com/downloads/files/Joomla...ules/Joomla-wap.zip/
This site has a working download for wap4joomla 1.5 (must be registered to download):
forums.budgethosting4u.com/index.php?topic=5.0
apparently the project is still active.
SMF is WAP compatible too:
www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=20964.0;all
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- Daniel Chapman
- Elite Rocketeer
- Posts: 1258
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You might just have to make a second site specifically for mobile access.
This is done a lot for non joomla sites too anyway -
www.ninjoomla.com
- The Ninjoomla Open Source Extension Club
Over 50 open source extensions and 100 videos to you build the site you want.
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- Raymond Basso
- Sr. Rocketeer
- Posts: 165
- Thanks: 1
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Thanks for the comments so far. I guess I better do a bit more research into this. I don't know anything about WAP. I guess the reason you can't see much from the web pages is the templates used for Joomla being viewed on a PDA. Maybe just the simple web page without Joomla is the answer. Maybe using Joomla for a mobile site is overkill.
I could always set up a sub domain on web pages I do for my clients and then install the scaled down web page in the sub domain. There is enough demand for such a thing that I could probably sell this to my clients and generate some extra work with each new web page by providing a mobile sub domain web page based on the design of their web page. Probably could make and extra $100 per site for about an hours work. Almost all of it would be using the same images and cut and paste the text. I will try this out on my own web page and report back to you.
Ray
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- Raymond Basso
- Sr. Rocketeer
- Posts: 165
- Thanks: 1
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I got to thinking that probably the best use for this would be a non-functioning web page that you could view on your PDA. Most of the time what you would use it for is to just show off your web page to people on your PDA. This would get them interested and later on when they were at their real computer they could look at the web page.
So just to try this theory I make a couple of screen shots and pieced them together into one image 300 pixels wide. Then I set up a sub domain and put the image on an html doc and named it index.htm. Uploaded it and in a few minutes I had a web page I could show people on my PDA. If you have a mobile device or PDA take a look at this. http://pda.raybasso.com The web page doesn't do anything but looks good on my PDA. Now I have to see if I can sell this to clients and make some money.
Ray
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did you by any chance look at the URL GollumX posted from xe-media in your mobile device? My phone is one of the cheapest LGs you can get and it displays that template just fine.
the very idea of a nonfunctioning site gives me the heebie jeebies but do what you gotta do.
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- Daniel Chapman
- Elite Rocketeer
- Posts: 1258
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It's like a dead person....
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www.ninjoomla.com
- The Ninjoomla Open Source Extension Club
Over 50 open source extensions and 100 videos to you build the site you want.
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- Ben Lee
- Elite Rocketeer
- Posts: 4193
- Thanks: 42
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So I don't know if this is the best implementation of a mobile site for a joomla site, but it works for right now. Since I originally set this up, I have added the iJoomla News Portal to my site which really raised the size (kb) of the front page, but it still works on most phones. I also used the xe-media template mentioned above and it really is easy to use.
My main site is:
www.collegeskydiving.com
The mobile site is:
www.collegeskydiving.com/mobile
The trick is using the template change cookie for the link to your mobile site:http://www.collegeskydiving.com/index.php?jos_change_template=xe_mobile
Now the first mobile site mentioned is a subdomain, but the link to the mobile webpage from there is the same joomla site that as was first mentioned, but with the cookie enabled. I did a separate first site simply so that I could list different links to different templates if I ever added a listing of what templates worked with what phones. From now on, I'll probably just have the link to straight to the mobile template.
In setting up the mobile template, I just named the user position in the xe-mobile template to one that was not on my usual template (rt_sporticus_news). That way the menu never shows up on the main page and only for the mobile users. This can easily be done in the admin backend site template area by adjusting the html page.
I also installed a cool phpBB forum plugin that works really well and is pretty light weight. This all updates automatically and you never really have to go change anything to make it update. If I am going to do a mobile site as well, I wanted it to automatically update so I didn't add one more thing to worry about.
Let me know if this looks like a decent solution.
Ben
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- Ben Lee
- Elite Rocketeer
- Posts: 4193
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- OK, so now I've added the Joomlatwork Accelerator that caches the pages for faster page loading and the cookie solution isn't working. Up until I added this, I swear it worked great.
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