Mobile Phone / iPhone / PDA Detection and Style Assignment
 

This add-on will detect most mobile phones, iPhones, PDAs and other mobile browsing devices and automatically for the user to a specific vBulletin style.

What can it do?
Detects most mobile phones and force the user to a specific style (users will not be able to select other styles from a mobile device with this add-on installed). If you have multiple styles installed which are optimized for small screen mobile devices, iPhones, WIndows Mobile devices you can assign a specific style to each of these groups.

Whilst designed with mobile device users in mind, you could also assign styles to self defined browsers. For example you can assign an alternative style to Internet Explorer users whilst Firefox users get the default style. You could also assign an alternative style to Google or Yahoo spiders.

Instructions:
0. Install styles which you wish to assign to Mobile/PDA/iPhone users - some links will appear at the bottom of this post
1. Download the product file
2. Install via Product Manager
3. Configure options via vBulletin Options, Mobile Device Detection (should appear at end)
4. Start browsing from your mobile device!
5. Click "Mark as Installed"

If upgrading from a previous 3.5 or 3.6 version, you will need to uninstall that and the install this one.

To uninstall simply uninstall the product - there are no database changes or additional files.

Styles released on vBulletin which you can use:
Dartho's Mobile, Cell, Phone, PDA, iPhone Style for vBulletin 3.7 (<-- yep, that's mine)
ElForro's iPhone / iPod Touch Optimized Style
Zachery's vB Lite Style
vBMechanics Mobile Alabama Style

Due to the stripped down nature of these mobile styles, you will find that most for 3.5 and 3.6 will work quite happily on 3.5, 3.6 & 3.7 although additional features introduced in vBulletin in recent years such as Social Groups, Blogs and Photo Galleries will not show well on a small screen. All should display your actual forums well.

3.6 Version can be found here

Marked as Beta until I get some feedback, and 3.7 goes Gold

Release Information
1.0.0 Initial release for 3.7 ported over from 3.6.8 version

I'll give it a shot... thank you very much!

I just tested this as much as I could with the iPhone and it works awesome!

Very well done!

Nominated too!

Great :up:

5 stars and nominated also.

Well I may have a little issue... it seems I can't change skins now on Firefox or IE7.

any ideas? www.exactservers.com is the test site.

Ok, I had to include Firefox and IE in the excluded list at the bottom in order to change skins from the default now.

I'm not sure this is a good thing as there are many browsers and I'm not sure the proper name for all of them to insert here?

would IE7 be just like that? what about IE6?

Edit... I was able to turn off :user defined detection" and now it works perfect.

G'day R1lover,

This add-on Forces the style on visitors - with this installed and enabled users of mobile devices are no longer able to select their own styles.

It should not affect people browsing from a PC - only mobile devices - and you should need to add exclusions for browsers such as INternet Explorer or Firefox etc.

If this is a bug introduced in the porting from 3.6 to 3.7 I'd be interested in following up to make sure it's working as designed.

Thanks

Hello, thank you.... I was able to turn off the user defined option I listed above and it works perfect.

Excellent, happy to hear it's working as it should!

User defined is for if you find a user with a mobile device which is not detected by this addon - you can then check their user-agent string and add it into the user defined list. If this does happen, you can let me know here and I will update the add-on accordingly.

Dartho,

What are the differences in this version and the one of 3.6.8 ?

Very little really this release includes a couple display enhancements in the AdminCP (you don't need to know the styleid number now, it provides a drop down of installed styles). and there is extra catching of mobile devices which is quite possibly redundant, but included none-the-less.

Mostly released as people asked for a 3.7 version and they likely feel more comfortable knowing it was written under vBulletin 3.7

Thank you my friend and of course when I have 3.7 I will install it for sure.

Also I think I will need a new mobile template for 3.7, right ?

I like this alot but I need to find some better styles for pda and other devices.

really interesting hack ... ;)

I'm going to make a SEO friendly google skin, but what would i need to enter to make sure google is reading this skin, rather then the user default?

thanks for the awesome idea

FRDS - "Googlebot" should do it for Google (Full User Agent string is "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)")

I believe there is some fine print on Google somewhere saying you must dispaly the same stuff to them as you do to regular visitors, it may be worth investigating, although I wouldn't think doing things like removing ads and welcome blocks etc whilst keeping the content the same would be an issue? Make sure you check this

Hi Dartho,

Great to see you have moved this to 3.7. I asked a question in your other 3.6 thread, but I think it's best asking here. Will you be updating your style for 3.7...is there any chance you can base the style around the default style for vB?

Thanks!

Regards Jason :)

any chance you might get this ready to use with the new skyfire browser.... just got my beta and skyfire is awesome but this script does not redirect me to our mobile site like pocket IE does.

i dont know what specifically skyfire identifies itself as but its not currently working with this script and i suspet more and more users will be going to this browser because its awesome.

@Jase2 - yes, I will release the mobi style for 3.7 - if you check the thread, you'll see that I did add a new CSS file yesterday which is based roughly on vBullein's default colour scheme.

@aggiefan - Use your PDA to browse your site with Skyfire, then form your PC check who is online, turn on display user agent and check the User Agent string of your skyfire browser. You can post it here, or send me a PM. Although if it does indeed render pages that well, you might want to add it to the exceptions list!

As always, you are a genius...

Dartho, you are great!! I will wait for the style release for 3.7 before applying this hack ;)

Thanks!

Regards Jason :)

Can iPhone, cell phones, and other mobile devices connect to a strictly https site?

Yes - most would support https...

Hi Dartho,

Sorry to bother you again. But when do you plan to release the style for 3.7? Pretty soon, I hope.

Regards Jason :)

question, in Custom/User Defined Useragent String there is listed firefox but nothing else.

which means if someone visits my site using firefox they will see the modi style even if they are not using mobile?.. is anyway around that.

plus what other mobile browsers can i put there in the list you see i don't use mobile web myself so is new to me..

You don't need to have anything listed in Custom useragents - it is disabled by default and I suggest you leave it that way.

I'll remove the default "firefox" text which was in there as a kind of reality check - you can test things are working by enabling the Custom section and viewing your site with Firefox.

You could however use the "Custom/User Defined Useragent String" to display a specific style to Firefox users only (it doesn;t have to be mobile)

thanks for that.. i did work that out just after i posted here.. D!OH

and i tested with pocketPC and it works fine, thankyou :) excellent work.

Installed -- thank you very much!

Regards Jason :)

Hello Dartho,

Doesn't seem to work on this: http://www.operamini.com/demo/ Any ideas why?

Jase - I'm not sure you have it configured correctly. I used that site to test mine and a couple other sites I know to be using this add-on. Yours was the only one not to work. You should double check you settings

As far as I know Dartho, all settings are correct. I have them set to "yes" and to use the 'mobile' style. Using vB 3.7 RC2. It loads, but it uses my default style.

Is the mobile style in Style manager ticked as user selectable?

Oops, somehow it wasn't ticked. It's now working. Thanks! Keep up the good work.

Hi,

Is it possible to send a user to the mobile style & then allow them to have the option to leave the mobile style? We have it turned on & some of our users are "stuck" in the style.

I have a Palm Treo 700wx & I am stuck myself :)

Thanks,
Rich

@RichTJ99 - no, not really with this as it is. There may be work arounds, but they would likely include cookies or DB queries....

I could possibly modify this so that rather than force a mobile style, it just places a link at the top of the page to the mobile style and perhaps a link at the bottom of the page within your mobile style to the full style?

When using fatwallet.com on my treo, it sends me to fatwallet.mobi, there is a link to visit the full version of the site.

Would it be possible to mimic that similar to your suggestion?

Can you put a link to both the mobile & full version styles on the top of each page (for mobile users)? Would that make sense? If its a text link it shouldnt really slow things down (maybe).

Thanks,
Rich

working good so far thanks!

If you intend on having a .mobi domain for mobile devices, or even a mobile.mydomain.com subdomain, have a look at "Different Domain, Different Style". That will do what you need. Then it's just a matter of putting links in your navbar or header or where ever you want...

Im just not sure how to get the job done without forcing the user to be stuck using the mobile style.

It sounds like you have a mobi domain, by definition that should be a mobile compliant site.

Rather than forcing them with this addon, simply educate your users - if they want a mobile interface, use .mobi, if they want a full version use the .com You could use DDDS for the .mobi and no detection on the .com and add a link in the .com navbar or footer to the mobile site.

I had a look at your site, and it seems you have something similar to this in place. I'd suggest asking your mobile device using members what they want

Fatwallet looks like it sets cookies to keep track of mobile preferences. A bit outside my area of knowledge at the moment.