Would it be possible to add a feature that allows a site admin to choose a different skin for mobile browsers?

You may want to take a look at the WURFL project at SourceForge. I just stumbled across this today, it is an XML file which contains info about capabilities and features of mobile devices.

Personally, I only care about the "real" web browsers on mobile devices. WAP/WML browsers are on their way out the door anyway.

Later,
Joe D.

Hi Jamie,

While modern mobile phones have a real web browser and can therefore use normal web pages, there is definitely a trend in trying to make mobile optimized browser experience.

One could easily develop a custom HttpModule that redirects requests from a mobile browser (or even the IIS url rewriter could probably do it), but I'm not really convinced that an optimized experience can be created by a skin. I think it would really require major changes in html and navigation structure. I'm sure it could be improved by skinning, just not sure you can get all the way there to an idealized experience.

If you'd like to take a crack at making a mobile optimized skin or at least one that is substantially better that would be great. I would love to be able to include such a skin with mojoPortal and if it worked well I'd be willing to figure out a way to make it possible to use that skin for mobile devices.

It is a problem that I'm pondering solutions for the long run but I still have many more things with higher priority. Even though mobile phones and mobile web are of growing importance, when I look at the percentage of traffic coming to my sites from such devices it is very small. Now it might be higher if we had an optimized experience but realize when I say small I mean less than 1% of traffic like iphone 0.2%, Android 0.1%, and even less for other devices, so even if an optimized experience boosts it I don't think it would be by that much at least at this point. So for now I'm more focused on adding more value for the vast majority than the very few.

Best,

Joe

Hi Jamie,

fyi, if you get the latest code, it is possible to force mobile devices to use a specific skin by config settings:

<add key="UseMobileSpecificSkin" value="true" />
  <add key="MobilePhoneSkin" value="mobile1" />
  <add key="MobilePhoneUserAgents" value="iphone,android" />

so it is possible to experiment with designing a skin for mobile phones, the MobilePhoneSkin must be the name of a skin in your site specific skin folder but since it is a config setting it is not site specific it will affect all sites so other sites would need a skin with the same name, if anyone comes up with a skin that really is nicer for mobile then I could promote those settings to site settings but for now it works at least for testing and for single site installations.

If you want to make your web browser use the mobile skin you could edit the MobilePhoneUserAgents, for example to make it use the mobile skin in Chrome for dev/testing purposes you could append ,webkit to the MobilePhoneUserAgents setting.

I think making a skin where the column layout is removed and the sections divCenter, divLeft, divRight just flow down the page would be a little better and there are probably other things that could be done as well.

Best,

Joe

Anyone interested in mobile should check out today's blog post Going Mobile with mojoPortal.

Best,

Joe