Nokia mobile theme for Drupal demo

Mobile, Software 1 Minute

In an effort to show what you can achieve with the nokia_mobile theme that (hopefully) will be released shortly, I set up a small demo site with some dummy content. You can visit the site with your mobile device at dtest.dreamhosters.com. Don’t hold your breath, it’s dummy content, but the device detection and how the theme adapts based on the device capabilities should be evident.

The Mobile Plugin normally uses a PHP implementation of the WURFL API, unfortunately on a cheap hosting service (I bought dreamhost’s CHEAPEST possible offer on purpose) this crashes the server. So for this demo I started implementing what is in my view the next step, a very basic device detection that will enable site owners to decide what they want to do. If they have a lot of content optimised for different devices, they should pick WURFL and use the advanced rules settings available in the plugin, on the other hand, if they want a basic detetion and provide just two or three layouts, a simple detection should be more than enough. With the current demo version, no cache files are generated and the detection is instant. I would like to make this part of Mobile Plugin, eventually and better integrate the device classification that I built in the nokia_mobile theme.

More on device classification in the next days.

Published by atrasatti

Born and raised in Italy, US resident. Innovator with a soft spot for developers. Currently director of developer advocacy @kin_foundation, previously @Samsung_IoT, @Nokia, an advocate of the open Web

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4 thoughts on “Nokia mobile theme for Drupal demo”

  1. This is an ambitious undertaking and I applaud you for getting this to work. Is there a way to force a mobile view on a desktop computer? Thanks, Andrea!

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  2. Hi Holly,very good question. There is a Drupal block kindly provided by the "Mobile Plugin", you can enable it easily from the admin pages at /admin/build/block . Choose where you want to place it, save and you are done.Notice that the block is enabled per-theme, so you should do it for both the mobile and the desktop theme.

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  3. Hi!Would you be able to elaborate on what you did to get WURFL to work on Dreamhost? The Drupal module instructions are a bit confusing ("Extract the contents in the lib directory of the module", yet there is no lib module..), and I surely don't want to crash my shared host's server.Thanks,Jason

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  4. Hi Jason,long story short, I could _NOT_ make WURFL work on Dreamhost. My idea was to install it locally, generate the cache and copy it to the server. It turned out the cache is 50+ MB and it would have taken me hours to upload it. Since I wanted to change the recognition anyway, I spent a few hours and implemented a new simpler recognition. It is now part of the module and if you download it the latest version (2.0) you will get it and you can install on dreamhost without WURFL. See the plugin homepage here: http://drupal.org/project/mobileplugin

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