Mobile Drupal

So lately I have been playing around with Drupal, I would consider myself a beginner in this area, although do have a bit of experience in Joomla. The particular area that I was interested in is Mobile as I have made a few iphone applications of late and wanted to delve more into web apps and their integration into different systems.

I have been also closely following jquery mobile in its alpha releases, so I decided I would see what has been done in this area, turns out not too much, although the necessary requirements in order for jquery mobile to work as a theme are getting closer with the jquery 1.4.4 now in the core for drupal 7.

I have run up a local install of drupal 7, and the only module that works in this area is mobile tools, which is a third party module that does the device detection which is enough to get started and do some programming and testing. Will will go about this in an agile manner, of course and prove that this will works then iteratively do some development around the different functionalities on the different platforms and using different themes based on user agents. I am hopeing that the Mobile Plugin & WURFL modules for drupal get updated somewhere along the line so we can use these modules functionality, as it is used in this space to detect the capabilities of the mobile/tablet or browser you are using, based on this we can use a different theme to offer up the best useability for the consumer. While the majority of users are on newer smartphones—iOS, Android, BlackBerry 5+ and WebOS are the major platform players, I see a consistent flow of people still using all sorts of older devices. For older phones it can be dangerous to throw it the same content and layout as the new smarter phones and can often lead to disaster, and can be especially perilous to assume any sort of meaningful JavaScript or advanced CSS support. That puts us in the best position to make these decisions with modules and themeing.

Another thing that sometimes needs to be taken into consideration is the need not just to provide adapted content to a given device class, but in fact to provide different content altogether. Due to the ill behaving way in which some browsers on some devices seem to work. We will leave out names here.

So back to some development