Mobile

With a few handy contributed modules, creating a mobile version of a Drupal website can be surprisingly painless. In this series of posts, I’ll run through one approach for doing so, using a few of those modules and themes.

This morning a Tweet piqued my interest; “FT.com launches subscription web app aimed at Smartphone & tablet users bypassing app store tariffs”. An interesting concept, so I followed the link which took me straight to the FT.com website.

Now, if there’s anything that’s going to drive me away from a website it's a pop-over – except, that is, a pop-over when I just happen to be trying to access your site using my mobile. This is what I got:

There's certainly a big buzz right now about responsive web design; flexible layouts that adapt dynamically to the user's device and its capabilities; screen size, resolution and so on. One of the major uses for this technique - a combination of flexible grids, resizeable images and CSS media queries - is as a mechanism for creating a mobile version of a site. And it's a very useful approach - dynamically changing the layout according to your device's capabilities enables content to be re-structured for the small screen with little effort.