Question

Im trying to create a mobile website for an existing joomla website. I’m an android developer and a new bee in wweb development. can you please guide me on how can i move, what steps i need to follow, which is the best way.. thank you in advance.

Answer 1

I’m actually in the process of doing this right now. I’ve decided to use the Mobile Joomla component. It makes it relatively easy to get going, but I had to tweak some things along the way. One thing I did was rip out jQTouch and replaced it with jQuery Mobile. Although now they may have a downloadable jQuery Mobile theme.

I also had a couple problems with the URL structure being a little bit different on the mobile site and not including some important URL parameters, but hell, it’s Joomla. Anyone who’s ever worked with Joomla knows that’s almost expected. Ended up fixing it with pure tinkering.

One nice thing about using mobile Joomla is it separates templates for several different types of phones. There is an iPhone template, XHTML template, etc. If you use something like jQuery Mobile, it’ll work on nearly any iPhone, Android or Blackberry. I added jQuery Mobile to both the XHTML template and iPhone template because I was aiming for strong iPhone compatibility, but I probably could have just used the XHTML template alone and used it for all devices.

In the process of developing this mobile site, I’ve also developed a mobile slider which utilizes iPhone swipe gestures. I plan on releasing the slider module to the public once the site itself launches. I tested it on Android and it seems to work nicely as well.

Hope that helps at least a bit.