Question to markup: Mobile output

konus · Post by **konus** » Wed Jun 08, 2011 12:58 am

I found the serendipity_event_mobile_output plugin, but no documentation (the link to the documentation is dead)

Can somebody give me a hint how serendipity_event_mobile_output is supposed to work? I installed it and opend my blog with my smartphone (Palm Pre+), but nothing happens, the blog looks like before.

Maybe the plugin does not recognize the browser of my device as a mobile browser? It is a Palm Pre+ and will send "Mozilla/5.0 (webOS/2.1.0; U; de-DE) AppleWebKit/532.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/1.0 Safari/532.2 Pre/1.1" as User-Agent-String.

Is there any documentation, how the redirection to a mobile website like m.yourblog.com should work? I guess I would have to create a dns-entry for it, but what is to do then?

Post by **yellowled** » Wed Jun 08, 2011 1:42 pm

Disclaimer: I'm not an expert on this plugin since I'm not a fan of these mobile versions.

konus wrote:Maybe the plugin does not recognize the browser of my device as a mobile browser? It is a Palm Pre+ and will send "Mozilla/5.0 (webOS/2.1.0; U; de-DE) AppleWebKit/532.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/1.0 Safari/532.2 Pre/1.1" as User-Agent-String.

Very likely. The plugin's wurfl/data/wurfl.xml has various entries for Palm, but this UA string seems fairly generic. Is this a rather new Palm device?

konus wrote:Is there any documentation, how the redirection to a mobile website like m.yourblog.com should work?

Basically, just add the mobile subdomain in your webhoster's config tool, fill it with content and add the URL in the plugin config. Never done that myself, either.

YL

konus · Post by **konus** » Wed Jun 08, 2011 2:04 pm

Thank you for your answer!

yellowled wrote:Disclaimer: I'm not an expert on this plugin since I'm not a fan of these mobile versions.

Me neither. It seems to me like a wrong access to try to know and recognize all mobile devices automatically. Every day there is a new OS-Version and every week there is a new device. To me, it looks like a race which is bound to be lost.

Very likely. The plugin's wurfl/data/wurfl.xml has various entries for Palm, but this UA string seems fairly generic. Is this a rather new Palm device?

I looked into the code and added my User-Agent-String manually, but since device recognition was not updated since Mai 2008, there are still many actual devices missing.

Basically, just add the mobile subdomain in your webhoster's config tool, fill it with content and add the URL in the plugin config. Never done that myself, either.

OK, I have done that. It works now, but looks kind of ugly.

BTW: Image resizing does not work on my host (uses GD, which I have)

Post by **yellowled** » Wed Jun 08, 2011 2:12 pm

konus wrote:It seems to me like a wrong access to try to know and recognize all mobile devices automatically.

Yes, that's the one big caveat with browser sniffing.

konus wrote:I looked into the code and added my User-Agent-String manually, but since device recognition was not updated since Mai 2008, there are still many actual devices missing.

That's another issue. If this plugin should work properly, it needs to be actively maintained, and by actively I mean at least on a weekly basis. I don't mean to step on anybody's toes, it's great that a plugin like this even exists for a small blog system -- but this doesn't seem to be the case here.

YL

konus · Post by **konus** » Wed Jun 08, 2011 4:06 pm

Can somebody give me a hint how to safely disable the automatic device recognition an forwarding option of this plugin? I would like to keep only the option to call my blog with a different (mobile)-template by going to the configured url.

seraphyn · Post by **seraphyn** » Wed Jun 08, 2011 4:24 pm

yellowled wrote:That's another issue. If this plugin should work properly, it needs to be actively maintained, and by actively I mean at least on a weekly basis.
YL

Where could I find All Useragents?
I think that'll be the problem in this case, isn't it?
So I'll raise my arm to have a look on this one, after I finished the template...
chris

Post by **garvinhicking** » Wed Jun 08, 2011 4:34 pm

Hi!

I think the plugin's config option for 'redirect' should do that...

Regards,
Garvin

konus · Post by **konus** » Wed Jun 08, 2011 4:49 pm

seraphyn wrote:Where could I find All Useragents?
I think that'll be the problem in this case, isn't it?
So I'll raise my arm to have a look on this one, after I finished the template...
chris

The original plugin is based of the work of Andy Moore from http://detectmobilebrowsers.mobi/ There is a newer version (April 2010) of the code available for download, however the license states, that it is only free to download and use on non-profit websites, so I guess it is not legally possible for s9y uses to use the information from there.

garvinhicking wrote:I think the plugin's config option for 'redirect' should do that...

No, the plugin always shows the mobile version to devices which are recognized. The option only decides, if the mobile version is presented on the normal domain or if the device is redirected to the mobile domain.

seraphyn · Post by **seraphyn** » Wed Jun 08, 2011 5:06 pm

But in this case, the only need is an updated list of user agents, isn't it?

Post by **yellowled** » Wed Jun 08, 2011 5:23 pm

seraphyn wrote:But in this case, the only need is an updated list of user agents, isn't it?

Yes and no. I'm not a coder, so the plugin's php code doesn't make much sense to me. But I assume there is some kind of logic involved to "assign" UAs to various options of the plugin, i.e. the different mobile templates. So that probably would need to be updated as well.

The actual issue remains that this plugin will need active maintainance and regular updates given the evolution of mobile browsers.

It also has some caveats beyond that, i.e. as far as I know, iOS and/or mobile safari on iPhone and iPad will be detected as the same UA. This means that iPad (768x1024px) users will be server the same template as iPhone (320x480px) users, which is not ideal, although you can always switch back to the desktop layout (which might or might not work on an iPad, but I hear the iPad is pretty good at adapting desktop layouts). I suspect a similar effect for Android tablets, but as far as I know, this hasn't been tested or verified yet.

YL

konus · Post by **konus** » Wed Jun 08, 2011 5:36 pm

I think, updating the list of user agents is the first step to get this plugin working as expected.

However, yellowled is right, there are some more problems with this approach. I think the provided mobile templates would need some work too. At the moment, there are several templates for several devices and no static pages included. I.e. my contact page (german: Impressum) is missing.
I would prefer one new mobile-only-template with the use of responsive web design to adapt to a wide variety of mobile devices.

Because the mobile template will/should always have some restrictions "by design", I also would like to have the option to let the user change back to the desktop template. So redirection should only work once in a session, I think at the moment this would not be possible with this plugin.

Post by **yellowled** » Wed Jun 08, 2011 5:49 pm

konus wrote:I think the provided mobile templates would need some work too.

Yes, they do. Unfortunately, they also are a pain in the rear end to work on.

YL

seraphyn · Post by **seraphyn** » Thu Jun 09, 2011 8:47 am

yellowled wrote:It also has some caveats beyond that, i.e. as far as I know, iOS and/or mobile safari on iPhone and iPad will be detected as the same UA. This means that iPad (768x1024px) users will be server the same template as iPhone (320x480px) users, which is not ideal, although you can always switch back to the desktop layout (which might or might not work on an iPad, but I hear the iPad is pretty good at adapting desktop layouts). I suspect a similar effect for Android tablets, but as far as I know, this hasn't been tested or verified yet.

YL

What about this Idea?
http://xdeb.org/node/1460
Could be implementet directly in a theme or better in a plugin.
This plugin could ask directly for another specific named CSS in {TEMPLATE_PATH}.
Chris

Post by **yellowled** » Thu Jun 09, 2011 1:20 pm

seraphyn wrote:What about this Idea?

That's basically responsive web design, but targeting the iPad specifically (which I think is not the way RWD is supposed to work).

YL

konus · Post by **konus** » Thu Jun 09, 2011 2:39 pm

Actually I don't care, if the there is responsive web design necessary or not to do the job of presenting a mobile view of my blog looking OK to most handhelds.

It even does not have to look similar to the desktop design (I would however like the same colors) and it should definitely not have all the features of the desktop version of my blog.

However, I would need at least an impressum / contact-page, a link to the desktop version and I would like to have a searchbox.

Later on I will try to work on some map integration, but this is another story.

Question to markup: Mobile output

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