Joomla on an offline iPhone?
June 23, 2009 10:45 AM Subscribe
I'd like to capture part of a Joomla site (that I run) onto an iPhone for offline browsing and searching. What's the best way?
I run a website for a Boffer LARP that frequently meets in the woods out of reliable cellphone signal range. We have a fairly lengthy rulebook on our website (which is managed by Joomla), mostly with lists of things that occasionally need to be looked up mid-game. While a Dead Tree edition works, the PDF comes out to about 300 pages due to lousy formatting, and would still be large even after I manually reformatted it to look better on paper (which is an ongoing project I am working on anyways, for the sake of people without electronic devices).
I would LOVE to be able to find a way to download the content of the Joomla site onto my iPhone, to make it easily browseable, and even searchable, when I don't have a signal. PDF is one way, but that involves A) Making the site PDF friendly, B) a 3rd-Party PDF reader, and C) re-compiling the PDF each time I want to update it. More ideal would be an app that could either plug into Joomla, or the iPhone, and could pull down the content directly to make it searchable on the iPhone itself, without a signal.
(For those who wonder about such things, yes, this does happen. We had two players get into an argument at 3:30 AM over the healing rules for the game to see if someone died or not... it took someone with an iPhone wandering around the camp to find a strong enough signal to look up the rules online, which was cumbersome to say the least.)
I run a website for a Boffer LARP that frequently meets in the woods out of reliable cellphone signal range. We have a fairly lengthy rulebook on our website (which is managed by Joomla), mostly with lists of things that occasionally need to be looked up mid-game. While a Dead Tree edition works, the PDF comes out to about 300 pages due to lousy formatting, and would still be large even after I manually reformatted it to look better on paper (which is an ongoing project I am working on anyways, for the sake of people without electronic devices).
I would LOVE to be able to find a way to download the content of the Joomla site onto my iPhone, to make it easily browseable, and even searchable, when I don't have a signal. PDF is one way, but that involves A) Making the site PDF friendly, B) a 3rd-Party PDF reader, and C) re-compiling the PDF each time I want to update it. More ideal would be an app that could either plug into Joomla, or the iPhone, and could pull down the content directly to make it searchable on the iPhone itself, without a signal.
(For those who wonder about such things, yes, this does happen. We had two players get into an argument at 3:30 AM over the healing rules for the game to see if someone died or not... it took someone with an iPhone wandering around the camp to find a strong enough signal to look up the rules online, which was cumbersome to say the least.)
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You will probably need to hack around a bit with Joomla to create the manifest file, declare it in the page content, and update the cache (if necessary). Since the manifest is declared in the root HTML tag on the page, that can occasionally be difficult - I haven't played with Joomla enough to be able to tell, unfortunately.
But this is probably your best bet.
posted by Remy at 12:37 PM on June 23, 2009