Forum Display Enhancements - 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

[ldma]

Another little problem I'm having is that I'm running VBAdvanced and it looks horrible and doesn't work in the mobile style. Is there anyway I can divert users straight to the forum index bypassing VBA? Possibly just with a template hack?

[ldma]

Ok in answer to my own question, I did what very other site does with this issue, and just created an "m" sub-domain and redirected it with .htaccess on my hostrs cpanel to the index page.

[MissKalunji]

Originally Posted by ldma

Ok in answer to my own question, I did what very other site does with this issue, and just created an "m" sub-domain and redirected it with .htaccess on my hostrs cpanel to the index page.

uh? i just used a forwarder instead in the template of vbadvanced

but your seems more fun so what it would be m.urwebsite.com ?

[ldma]

Yep....just like Facebook!

http://m.ajarnforum.net

The beauty of it is that it's just a vanilla redirect that does nothing, but just allows me to give mobile users the impression I'm catering specifically for them with their own url....this plugin does the rest, and I avoid VBA.

On the other hand if people do go to the regular address, I've set up meta refresh in the mobile template's portal template. The disadvantage is that it does display it first before diverting.

[gopherhockey]

Installed... all looks good until I go to hit submit on a reply to a thread and I get:

Your submission could not be processed because a security token was missing or mismatched.

If this occurred unexpectedly, please inform the administrator and describe the action you performed before you receved this error.

----

Using Windows Mobile 6 on a Sprint Touch device.

[gopherhockey]

Originally Posted by gopherhockey

Installed... all looks good until I go to hit submit on a reply to a thread and I get:

Your submission could not be processed because a security token was missing or mismatched.

If this occurred unexpectedly, please inform the administrator and describe the action you performed before you receved this error.

----

Using Windows Mobile 6 on a Sprint Touch device.

Ahhh.. I did the <input type="hidden" name="securitytoken" value="$bbuserinfo[securitytoken]" /> thing and it worked. Thought maybe the 3.7 version would have that in there already.

[gopherhockey]

This is super cool. Instantly my favorite mod. Nice job!

Don't know why they couldn't have done this type of thing built-in... they are too busy making forums into facebook software and not concentrating on functionality of a real forum system I guess.

Oh well, thats what vbulletin.org is for!

[dartho]

This has just been fixed in the mobile style ...

Originally Posted by gopherhockey

Installed... all looks good until I go to hit submit on a reply to a thread and I get:

Your submission could not be processed because a security token was missing or mismatched.

If this occurred unexpectedly, please inform the administrator and describe the action you performed before you receved this error.

----

Using Windows Mobile 6 on a Sprint Touch device.

[gopherhockey]

Ok, so using this for a few days now I have noticed a few things:

First, it only works when you are logged into the forums. Is this normal?

Second, I have not had anyone but myself see this work. (I am an adminstrator). Blackberry devices, other mobile 6 or even mobile 5 devices - so far it only works for me.

My guess is I'm missing some security setting that allows this to work for people?

On my forums, I do not allow people to select other styles. We have one default style, thats it. This mobile style I thought can be "forced" but do you need special user or group rights to have this work?

Sure enough, if I log into a test user on my phone this does not work...

I do have the setting in vb "Allow users to change styles" set to no.

[gopherhockey]

I believe I have fixed my issue. While I have the forums set to not allow users to change their styles, I did not click the checkbox on the mobile style when I installed it, allowing users to actually use it.

Apparently with this unchecked the admin can select it, but nobody else can. This must be checked and does not get checked by default when installed (at least it didn't for me)