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.