dev.mobi goes mobile (again)

Hopefully you've all spotted the new mobiForge design.

Just a few days later, we've dusted off a new mobile version too. Better a little late than never.

Previously we used to redirect the user off to a whole different server for the mobile UI. This was a bad practice. What we've now done is create a module for our own CMS engine (we use Drupal) which recognises a mobile device's request on every page and sends a different theme accordingly.

There is one great advantage to this, which is something known as 'thematic consistency'. If you bookmark a mobiForge page with your PC and, say, send it to your mobile, the same content will be present (albeit in a skinnier theme). In other words, the mobile users are not denied any of the site's content.

Well OK, that's not strictly true. We currently also run a little tag stripper for the mobile devices - primarily to avoid any dodgy markup getting through to them and blowing up the XHTML compliance of the pages. At the moment, we strip out images from the articles, so arguably, some of the content is missing for mobile devices. This is in lieu of a proper image trascoder that will shrink them on the fly. Watch this space...

No doubt there are plenty of readers who'd like to try and catch us out on our own recommendations. Please go ahead - it will be very useful testing :-) Most of the pages seem to sail through ready.mobi with 5/5, but I'm sure a few don't. [hint: the forum area is probably the least mobile-friendly section, currently].

Have fun.