Mobile me

January 29, 2012 7:43 AM

Drupal mobile site: what's the easiest solution?

I have a drupal site. I want to make (some parts of) it mobile. I saw something called "mobi" that works with a .mobi TLD if I'm not mistaken. Not sure if it's a good solution.

Ideally, I would have some off the shelf solution or at least something that's easily implemented. I don't feel like spending too much on custom development for something that the whole world is doing right now. Can you point me to some informative resources on the topic? Thanks in advance.

posted by NekulturnY to computers & internet (2 answers total)

Check out the Mobile Tools module. You can use it to do device detection and either redirect to a separate mobile site or display your site with a mobile theme.
posted by kittydelsol at 8:00 AM on January 29, 2012

Is your site in Drupal 6 or Drupal 7? If you are using Drupal 6, then Mobile Tools is probably your best option. Mobile Tools will let you switch to a separate mobile theme when your site is accessed by a mobile device. There are a number of Drupal 6 mobile themes on Drupal.org to choose from.

If you are using Drupal 7, then you should explore some of the "responsive" base Drupal themes. They don't have to be a huge time sink. A responsive theme is one where the display of content changes as you change the width of your browser or switch to from a desktop to a tablet or mobile device. For a more more detailed overview of responsive design, check out this article by Ethan Marcotte.

The three major responsive themes in Drupal right now are Omega, AdaptiveTheme, and Fusion (dev version).

Since these are all base themes, they might be more time to get ready for your site than you care to spend. An alternative might be to purchase a responsive theme from the creators of AdaptiveTheme or Fusion. I don't think that the Omega store is up yet.

The big question when you're building for mobile devices in Drupal is whether all of your content is going to appear on the mobile version of your site or just some of it. If not everything is going to be on your mobile site, then you need to implement either Mobile Tools or a responsive theme and the context module or another contributed module that lets to selectively assign content to the site.

Feel free to memail me if you have more questions.
posted by JuliaKM at 6:50 PM on January 29, 2012