Question

I am considering making a mobile version of a forum. I do not have database access.
I am thinking i’ll have to fetch the URL and sort out topics. Does anyone have other ideas or comments on how to achieve this?

Answer 1

Similar to j_mcnally’s answer, you should check out CSS media queries. What you’re looking to do sounds like you don’t have much (or any) access to the code of the forum itself but you want to change the look. You could definitely create a mobile version of the site like mobile.yourname.com but it’s obviously preferred to have just yourname.com and have the stylesheet apply based off of screen size. Technically you could sniff out the particular devices and apply a stylesheet to each them, but this is not preferrable seeing as you would have to create a style for every different possible screen size.

Long story short, you have a surprising amount of options: but use CSS media queries. This practice is known as responsive design. I’d highly recommend checking out Ethan Marcotte’s book (he’s pretty much the guy who started the movement behind responsive CSS). If you don’t want to buy the book, I’d suggest starting with his article which is a pretty good summary of the contents of the full book. Either one is a huge help if you’re looking to get into this sort of thing.