pLog goes mobile!
06/06/2005 01:25 | Categories: LifeType | 0 Comments
I have been working on and off for the last couple of weeks on a mobile version of plog. At first I thought about integrating it with the core (in the next major release, 1.1), but I eventually decided to implement it as a plugin: those who want this feature can have it now and those who don't need it, don't have to put up with the extra code 
The plugin adds a new entry-point to plog, mobile.php which handles all the incoming requests from mobile devices. It implements its own action classes, views and more importantly, it implements the terminal detection.
Terminal detection in the mobile version of pLog is done based on the User-Agent string that all browsers send when making HTTP requests. The plugin is built so that every terminal 'group' can have its own custom templates, and each terminal is identified via a regular expression check against its User-Agent (take a look at the default terminal.properties.php file) This also means that all mobile versions of blogs share the same common look (only one mobile template per device)
I have only implemented support for Nokia Series60 phones (specially for the Series60 version Opera) because I do not have access to any other phone People are probably going to request WAP support but I will leave it up to them to do that... WAP is really a pain to work with and I have nowhere to test it. Other possible platforms include PDAs, Treo phones, iMode, etc, so I hope users help a bit here.
Last but not least, the mobile version of this blog is accessible via the "mobile version" link that you will find at the top. At the moment all requests will use the same template, a lighter HTML 4.01 page that allows to see posts and comments (both paginated) with no category listings, search engine or anything like that. It does not allow to leave comments yet but that is not a critical feature considering how annoying it is to type in mobile devices...
The plugin will be available shortly, as soon as I can document it in the wiki and upload it to Sourceforge.net