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

[dartho]

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

[mariocaz]

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 ?

[Zaiaku]

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

[KURTZ]

really interesting hack ...

[SEOvB]

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

[dartho]

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

[Jase2]

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

[aggiefan]

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.

[dartho]

@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!

[tazzarkin]

As always, you are a genius...