Has anyone had a go at knocking together a PDA or WAP version of the vbulletin board software?

We've been hacking around with a script to produce the last 10 discussion topics etc; but before we do a huge load of work on it, has anyone else done something similar?

IS there a market for this product? For quite a while it would the economics would seem cost prohibitive to use and would undermine development time spent. What were the uses you were thinking about?

We have several thousand people who access SitePoint through our SitePoint To Go product. This is SitePoint on the Avant Go browser which ships with every Palm and a lot of Windows CE devices and Cell Phones.

I regularly access news and information from the Web with my Cell Phone. The cost isn't much, I pay a flat $8.95 a month for web access on it and since there are no graphics, it is very speedy.

CNN, MSN, Yahoo, AOL, Amazon.com and many other companies offer Wireless versions as well.

Sitepoint is not just forums. I've seen your site. It's impressive. Our experience, professional and personal, is that WAP enabled devices are not yet ready for heavy interactivity, especially where text entry is concerned. There is much more demand for items such as simple tools, viewing simple pages, reading news, etc. I can see people wanting to view parts of sitepoint but the forums would not be priority nor probably feasible on a wireless. (BTW, I liked the legal article, being in that part of the biz myself.)

Wow... flat fee with no charge for bandwidth? Haven't heard of something that good and especially not at that price. Adding on to my comments, all the sites that you mentioned (and the news) are sites that have functionality that are not the primary purpose of vBulletin. I can see content publishing systems having this functionality and perhaps when a a $10 flat fee for the wireless web comes to this side of the states we'll see what usage is like on wireless!

WAP devices aren't; PDAs are. We're running a very rudimentary discussion plug-in on Liv4now.com's Avantgo channel right now.

We'll do some tinkering!

Hmmm... interesting. I think the same rule applies though -- most will not be using their PDA to do text entry, more for data retreival. Avant Go generally features one way information -- Zagat's, News (Wired, NY TImes, etc.) with some limited input (weather, stocks). I think the same rule holds true about a true publishing tool versus vB although I wouldn't be averse to using any PDA hack that is provided a low cost. :)

The problem with vb on this point is that still not every html code is customizable without going through the php code...There's still alot of hardcoded html in it.

I would think a succesful PDA version would require more specific offline syncronization and not just a limited bandwidth version for online browsing.

There are many more people who would use a conduit approach (or an AvantoGO approach) that allowed them to sync to interesting threads, pull down headers, write replies offline and re-sync etc., than would be browsing online in real time.

Both interfaces would be nice, but I suspect the sync and go interface would get much more play.

-t

I put together a few scripts for UBB to do just this, and I'm pretty confident that you can do much of this via templates, at least for PDA use.

I'm working on it now, in fact; I might report back.

Well, this is where I am so far...

Our AvantGo channel used to allow people to read, but not post. (This was so that page impressions on our main service weren't affected). Obviously, a web-clipping application would allow you to post too, but AvantGo being offline, we didn't feel the user needed to post (and we had no complaints, certainly).

We hacked the "View new posts" equivalent to be in a simple style, and the displayed posts to also be in a simple style.

In the case of VB, editing the styles is easy - so that our normal style and http://forums.mediauk.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=1680&style=2]a proposed AvantGo style[/url] is pretty simple to organise.

But, seemingly I can't do "search.php?s=&action=getnew&style=2" - i.e. force the "get new messages" search in the AvantGo style.

Am I missing something obvious?

My site also is set up with an AvantGo account. Keep in mind that you're limited as to how much space your account can have and a user can only go so far in depth into your site. Also bear in mind that tables and images are very hard to decipher when viewed through a PDA and are often misconstrued. I would be very skeptical that viewing Forums would be easy to do through a PDA.

I did it, and it looked beautiful - if you restrict it to "latest messages", so give only a subset of messages, it works beautifully.

Promise.

We'll get it working with VB too... :)

Guys,

My Palm Pilot can't handle surfing, but it's great for offline content. I'll suck up a web document, then read it later offline.

I released this hack to simply convert a thread to downloadable PalmDoc format, similar to the "Printer Friendly Version".

I'm not sure if this will help, but good luck! :D

Anymore news regarding this type of hack?

Anyone get this done? I run a couple of Palm user group web sites and this would be a MUST have for them. :)

Success!!

I've made a very cut-down version of my forums specifically for AvantGo use - by mucking about with vbSpiderFriend, a hack originally meant to create a text-only spider friendly version of your forum for Google.

http://forums-lite.mediauk.com/ to have a peek (of course, it looks appalling on a PC!!)

One caveat: it's READ ONLY.

Any good to anyone?

It looks crude, yet good:)

Satan

Oh yes!
I frequently use GPRS to check the latest post on my laptop.
I have been on the lookout for something that let's me do this without graphics at all, but I have been to lazy to code it myself. :)

Any support for logging in too?

hmm.. on www.esato.com they use phpBB.. but you can also use the forum from wap.esato.com (strippet of images etc)!

how d?d they do that?

Anyone have a complete text version of their forum (but not read only?)

I'm looking for a solution as well.

Vbulletin WAP forum... http://wap.howardforums.com

The howardsforums doesn't seem to work very well on my wap phone, although I wonder if it's just the service that's not up & running.

However, as mobile phones and PDAs melt together (which is really starting to happen right now, just look at the sony ericsson P800 and others) I truly believe this idea should be worked on. Although WAP seems to be declared as a flop after the late 90's tech bubble, I submit to you that this is the point where WAP (or certainly wireless Internet in general) WILL become a widely used reality.

Using PDAs with high-res color screens and improved methods for text input, browsing forums and even posting shouldn't be too hard if the forums are designed with this usage in mind. These devices can be connected to the net through GPRS (which offers reasonable bandwith and charges only per MB downloaded instead of per minute) or WLAN (which offers great bandwith and is becoming very very popular), there really is no need to wait for "3G" or anything...

Personally I believe that forums could become something of a "killer app" for wireless devices much in the same manner as instant messaging. Combine mobility with an "always-on" connection, as well as people's desire to communicate (just look at the huge success text messaging has been in Europe, even with tiny displays and high prices) and interesting possibilities emerge...

Please post and elaborate on any progress with this project...

Regards,

TMM

I previously had a Kyocera 6035, one of those 'smartphones. I could indeed go on forums and post. However JavaScript wasn't supported very well and neither were cookies.

I currently have a Samsung i330 (glee) and finally I don't have to go through so much BS just to view a forum. It was too much work before and not worth the time.So far just going to a normal forum (IE yaxay.com) everything works fine. I can't search of vbulletin.com's forum but it seemed to work fine on yaxay. Its just all those images that makes me have to scroll down so much to get to the content (yaxay is the worse in that regard haha)

I'm currently trying to remodel a forum to work on my i330.Er i have no real experience with vb templates. Its mostly just taking away what already exists. Its little more then taking away alot of the images, text, and throwing every little element in a new cell. Just sort of modifying an existing skin.

So far just going to a normal forum (IE yaxay.com) everything works fine. I can't search of vbulletin.com's forum but it seemed to work fine on yaxay. Its just all those images that makes me have to scroll down so much to get to the content (yaxay is the worse in that regard haha)

If anyone has a pocket PC or another palm device that allows them to view webpages i might be interested in talking to them since I have no real clear understanding what does and does not work on different devices.

I have developped the pda templates :

http://pocketforum.pdafrance.com

pdatoon, are you going to share? I like it!!! People have been asking about this on our site for quite some time and you have an excellent template.

One question, how can this be used with another template at the same time? Ie: Does a user need to change templates when he uses his cell-phone and then change back when he uses his standard computer?

Hi,

The problem is that it is all in french :hurt:
I have created a new style and the url : pocketforum.pdafrance.com redirects to a specific style ID.

I agree here. In fact, I would like to say that more and more people are using this service today with the new phones. Hell, I hold conversations (messenger) with friends all over the world using my cell-phone. Certainly a toned-down version of my site would be helpful so I can check PM's, approve posts, see links, check user stats, etc....

I'm at the point right now where I need to create a WAP page for mobile users. They are paying me extra money (monthly) for me to look into this.

Funny thing is, if you can bring your users together for a common topic, they will do anything to 'keep up' with the group. Sorta like extended families.

One step at a time.......................

-- Mike

I could replace the French items... :banana:

Yea, I see the style ID in your URL now... I should try your site on my WAP browser.

-- M

Damn, looks like my cell phone (LG VX4400) doesn't support HTML. It's a WAP only device. :(

OK I also own a PPC site and am looking for a way to do this with Avanto and Mazingo.net service. I am willing to pay for this if somebody can create it and make it work. Let me know.

Corey McLaughlin
www.pocketpcminds.com

I am also interested in a PDA template. I am in the process of migrating pdaPhoneHome from phpBB to vBulletin. The site is heavily modified and has a lot of phpBB driven pages that pull data from the database. I have a complete version of the site done for PDAs and need to do the same for vBulletin before I can migrate. I've bought my license for vB and started working on porting the site, thinking that I could drop the PDA version for now... but my users don't agreee. I need a PDA template quickly.

If the PDAToon's version is in French, is there anyone here who could translate it? Or, could PDAToon give us a "step by step" on what you had to do to get this template done? I'm stuck on phpBB until I can figure this out... and now that I've seen vB.... I really want to get moved over. ;)

I'm not ready to post a link to it yet, but I have had success in doing a PDA version. This was way easier than with phpBB. I intially got the French template from pdatoon, but all the templates in that template set are French, and I didn't want to translate all of them, especially since you don't need to convert every template to PDA format. Many of them handle it already, and many of them can be left full screen for the few times you'll need it. So, in the end I just modified them myself, it it only took a few nights to get the majority of the highly used ones.

I grabbed a copy of my existing template which has a lot of additions already. Then I went to the index page, grabbed the template for it.. cut out all I didn't want, and modified the remainder. With each page, there are several templates involved, so you'll refresh the page and find that you missed something, open that template and repeat the cycle. Then I did the forums, then search, the replies/new threads, then all my vbIndex pages. I is pretty straightforward. You can always go back to the original if it breaks during your edit. But... beware... you need to go back to the original that you started with for your site. I was pulling my hair out becuase I reverted to the original, but that backed out a hack that was in my default template... so I just had to copy the default back in for that one and restart the hack for that template.

For the big templates, I found it much faster to copy the code into an HTML editor that would color code the tags, then edit, then copy it back. This also gives you some undo abilty without total backout. I probably did about 30-40 template... about 5-10 minutes per template. I still need to do the messaging template, and I'll probably stop at that.

I recommend that anyone doing this do their own, because otherwise you'll be dealing with hack mismatches, and you may hve different desires for what you want to cut out our leave in.

By the way, you just need to through in ?styleid=x to get to it, then reverse to get back to full screen. When this is production ready I'll have a link on each version's navigation menu to get back and forth.

I am loving vBulletin more every day.

I made a PDA version of WDF that includes forumhome, showthread, forumdisplay, getinfo, and most PM templates (which I am selling). Most of the work is just completely gutting the templates of 90% of their HTML. Of course, you lose some functionality in the process, but you won't be doing much important stuff on a 240x320 screen.

In pdatoon's version (which I sadly don't have) you can reply to posts and start new threads. Is yours also capable of that filburt? And what about mccollin's? This is essential functionality for me.

- djr

I have included so far index, all forum views (if nested), thread view (with the main moderator functions like move), new thread, reply, search, search results, new posts, and most of my vbindex portal pages. But, all the pages are there, so if you hit a page that isn't in PDA format, it still works, just not small. I will probably call it done after I do the private messaging page. I won't do the remainder of the control panel because I can't imagine why any one would need to use that from their PDA. If you did, you could use the bigger screen. pdaToon's template does basically the same stuff, but he has scaled it back much more than I have. For example on post reply, he just has the subject and body, and buttons. I left the thread review in there, and a few other things. On the forum views, he's got just the title of the forums or threads... I take up a few rows and include the other stuff in a colapsed fashion. I'm basically replicating what I had done with phpBB, so I had a model I liked.

Once you start doing it, it really isn't that bad. Just make sure you are on a test site, or you are very careful not to get mixed up on what template you are editing.

Yes, in mine you can reply to posts and make your own threads, tedious as it is on the on-screen keyboard or handwriting recognition ;)

filburt,

What kind of device are you using .... pdaPhone, PDA, phone? Before moving to vB, I used the PDA version of my site to stay in touch during the work day. It was great... slower to type than my laptop, but not too bad.

I'm using a Pocket PC with Pocket Internet Explorer on a wireless network. It's very nice for reading, worse so for posting (just because it's tedious when you're used to a full-sized keyboard).