mobileOK Pythia for Joomla!
mobileOK Pythia is a plug-in for Joomla! designed to help adapt content from a Joomla! Web site to fit the properties of the requesting device, and in particular to generate mobileOK content when the requesting device is identified as mobile.
mobileOK™ is a mark formally defined in the W3C mobileOK Basic Tests 1.0 standard. It ensures that some steps were taken to provide a functional user experience for users of basic mobile devices. Please refer to About The W3C mobileOK Checker for more information about mobileOK.
Beyond mobileOK, the mobileOK Pythia plug-in provides facilities to take advantage of the capabilities of the requesting device when known. The plug-in was developed in as generic a way as possible and may be extended, e.g. to make use of other device properties or to switch to a different Device Description Repository. The plug-in uses WURFL by default but accesses this database through a standard DDR Simple API that could be extended to support other DDRs.
Description
Main features of the mobileOK Pythia plug-in for Joomla! are:
- Device identification: AskPythia identifies the requesting device based on the information of an underlying Device Description Repository (DDR). WURFL, an open-source DDR published as an XML file, is used by default. WURFL is a collective effort from mobile developers from around the world and contains information about the capabilities of many existing mobile devices. WURFL stands for Wireless Universal Resource File.
- Content adaptation: TransPythia adapts content to fit the properties of the requesting device. Transcoding actions include pagination of lengthy posts, images resizing and conversion to fit the screen size and supported formats of the requesting device, and various tidying operations to remove embedded elements that are hardly supported by mobile devices or to remove scripting when the requesting device has no support for scripting.
- Template switching: possibility to switch to a more mobile-friendly template when the requesting device is identified as mobile.
- mobileOK template: a mobileOK version of the default Joomla! accessible template (Beez).
- POWDER: the plug-in can automatically generate a machine-readable mobileOK claim for the WordPress Web site using a POWDER document. The POWDER document is made discoverable through the addition of a
LinkHTTP header field as decribed in the POWDER Primer. - W3C mobileOK Checker link: the plug-in adds a link to the W3C mobileOK Checker in the content authoring page to assert the mobile-friendliness of the created content while it is being written.
The plug-in has been tested with Joomla! v1.5.
Installation
Installation steps to activate the mobileOK Pythia plug-in for Joomla!:
- In the administrative pages, go to Extensions / Install/Uninstall.
- You should already be on the Install tab. If not, select it.
- Paste the URL of the mobileOK Pythia package to the Install from URL field and press Install:
http://dev.w3.org/2009/mobileok-authoring/plugins/joomla/mobileOKPythia.zip - The plug-in should now appear in the Plugin manager under the name mobileOKPythia. Activate the plug-in.
- Adjust the settings as required by clicking on mobileOK Pythia in the plugins list.
Installation of the mobileOK template is not required. If available, a mobileOK template that matches the default desktop theme should be preferred to ensure thematic consistency between desktop and mobile versions of the blog. If you wish to install the mobileOK template that ships with the mobileOK Pythia plug-in:
- In the administrative pages, go to Extensions / Install/Uninstall.
- Click on the Templates tab.
- Paste the URL of the beez mobileOK package to the Install from URL field and press Install:
http://dev.w3.org/2009/mobileok-authoring/plugins/joomla/mobileOKPythia.zip - The template should now appear in the Template manager.
- To activate the template within the mobileOK Pythia plug-in, go to the mobileOK Pythia settings through the Plugin manager list, and enter
mobileok-defaultin the name of the template for mobile devices. Save your changes.
Please note that the plug-in requires PHP 5.x and has not yet been submitted to the Joomla! Extension Directory (JED).
Screenshots
Following is an illustration of core operations (pagination, image resizing) performed by the plug-in when the requesting device is identified as a mobile device. Total page size, including images and CSS stylesheets, does not exceed 20Kb:
The same content without the plug-in appears truncated, even on a high end mobile device. Total page size, including images and CSS stylesheets, is more than 300Kb:
Source code
The source code of the mobileOK Pythia plug-in for Joomla! is distributed under a GNU General Public License in accordance with Joomla!'s requirements for plug-ins. Please note that the stand-alone libraries used within the plug-in (e.g. AskPythia and TransPythia) are distributed under a more permissive W3C Software Notice and License.
The mobileOK version of the Beez template is distributed under a GNU General Public License.
Feedback
Comments, suggestions, contributions and bug reports should be sent to the public-mobile-dev@w3.org mailing-list. The archives of the list are publicly available.
You can subscribe to the list (and unsubscribe), or if you just have a small question and don't want to join the list, feel free to send it directly to the list.