There have been a few discussions off and on about the desire to make our sites more "mobile friendly". I'm working on a new project that could benefit from better mobile support. I have some ideas on on what I'd like to see, but I'm quickly getting lost in the options surrounding this topic, so I thought I'd throw a few things out here before making any formal wishes on the feedback site.
There is what appears to be a pretty good open source script that could be useful at Detect Mobile Browser that might be good for Wikidot to add to their arsenal. I think having a new module that did something like this could be a relatively simple first step (making use of the above script):
[[module ifMobile redirect="false"]]
... display content
[[/module]]
or
[[module ifMobile redirect="true" goTo="http://this-mobile-site.wikidot.com"]]
If something like this is implemented, it would be a nice way show content to only mobile users or to automatically redirect them to a different site.
It's not that hard to strip down a Wikidot site by hiding elements that we don't necessarily want or need on a mobile version of our sites via CSS, but that doesn't help keep the "bloat" to a minimum as recommended by the dotMobi spec. What do you think about having a Site Manager option where we could explicitly define a site as one intended for mobile browsers that has a simpler template, minimal CSS, javascript, etc? That way we would be better able to control the amount of data that loads for each page.
My use case for exploring these options is for a golf course I'm helping out. They'd like to have a mobile friendly, stripped down version of their site that basically gives their customers access to things they would likely use on their phone, like booking a tee time, checking out their rates and maybe looking at the menu for the bar and grille as they approach the end of their round. I started a very basic site to do that (see Eagle Trace Golf - mobile), but it still fails miserably on the mobiReady test I ran on it. There is still some work I need to do to minimize my CSS, but I'm sure it still won't be enough. One issue I found for older phones is that their browsers are very basic and they don't even handle {display: none;} in the CSS, so elements that I try to hide are still loaded and displayed.
Is this something you think is worth pursuing via formal wishes? If so, can you help me sort out the best way to phrase them?
Thanks,
Ed





