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

[GCSkye]

I have sent you a pm, thanks for the mod thus far. Works great.

[dartho]

OK - try the attached. Basically, if a user has used the style chooser (ie. manually chosen a style), it won't override their choice.

example 1 - user visits via iPhone for first time, they get presented with iPhone skin as configured. If they change teh style to default skin, all visits from here on in will present them with default skin or what ever style they manually choose from then on

example 2 - users visits with small screen old nokia phone, they get presented with mopbile skin as configured. If they change the style to defualt skin, all visits from then on will present them with teh default skin. If their browser can't handle it and they can;t get back to the style chooser. they will not be able to view your site properly again.

proviso's - browser must accept cookeis for this to work (clearing browers cookies will reset)

[GCSkye]

Figured cookie would be the way to go for a start. You could add an option into vbulletin option to allow this feature to be off and on if you find an alternative to cookie.

An idea would be to have it check the serial of the mobile device and store it for a day as a mobile device that had been detected already. Once it does that it will no longer detect what skin it needs to be changed to. (Again this can be a feature admins can enable and disable and possible choose to manually flush the sql or have it automatically done x days)

An alternative to sql could be a file in ftp.

[GCSkye]

Added it to my forum and when I went to view a forum (not on mobile) I got this error:



I am currently running 3.8.1 vbulletin, and I have reinstalled the old version of the mod.

[dartho]

Bugger - looks like I missed a closing brace, I've updated the attachment above in my last post - give it another go!

[nNJ]

Wow, its insanely lucky I checked this tonight.

Out of the blue, I thought it would be a good idea to check back here to see if there were any updates that DIDN'T force a user to use a predefined (assumably mobile) theme.

It just so happens it payed off.. What are the odds..

Anyway, in the second scenario above, if a user changes his or her skin from the mobile skin, and are unable to change back, they can choose the style manually by typing the style id into the url.

Example:
Domain.com/forums/index.php?styleid=3.

Thanks a lot dartho, I'm on my mobile device atm, but tomorow I'm going to be uninstalling the original hack, and installing this one.

IMHO, you ought to develope this idea further. I think it will be well received by the community.

To be honest, its extremely annoying to visit my own forum (on my phone) and not be able to choose my own style. There's only so much you can do with a mobile style, and some phones can handle the full skins.

Forcing a user to use a skin doesn't make sense to me. IMO, defaulting a mobile user's to a mobile theme makes sense, not giving them the option to change it doesn't.

As an idea for a future release (should you decide to make one) would be to make the "force" aspect of this mod a boolean, (am I phrasing this right?) so that users can turn it on/off in their admin cp's.

Overall, I love this hack. This new release without the "force" just makes it that much better.

Great job, and thanks dartho!

[nNJ]

Wow, its insanely lucky I checked this tonight.

Out of the blue, I thought it would be a good idea to check back here to see if there were any updates that DIDN'T force a user to use a predefined (assumably mobile) theme.

It just so happens it payed off.. What are the odds..

Anyway, in the second scenario above, if a user changes his or her skin from the mobile skin, and are unable to change back, they can choose the style manually by typing the style id into the url.

Example:
Domain.com/forums/index.php?styleid=3.

Thanks a lot dartho, I'm on my mobile device atm, but tomorow I'm going to be uninstalling the original hack, and installing this one.

IMHO, you ought to develope this idea further. I think it will be well received by the community.

To be honest, its extremely annoying to visit my own forum (on my phone) and not be able to choose my own style. There's only so much you can do with a mobile style, and some phones can handle the full skins.

Forcing a user to use a skin doesn't make sense to me. IMO, defaulting a mobile user's to a mobile theme makes sense, not giving them the option to change it doesn't.

As an idea for a future release (should you decide to make one) would be to make the "force" aspect of this mod a boolean, (am I phrasing this right?) so that users can turn it on/off in their admin cp's.

Overall, I love this hack. This new release without the "force" just makes it that much better.

Great job, and thanks dartho!

[GCSkye]

Originally Posted by dartho

Bugger - looks like I missed a closing brace, I've updated the attachment above in my last post - give it another go!

Not that time, you got it. Strongly appreciate this and I can see others are as well. Only complaint I got from this mod is members couldn't change there skin at will. Thanks for the updates.

Originally Posted by nNJ

To be honest, its extremely annoying to visit my own forum (on my phone) and not be able to choose my own style. There's only so much you can do with a mobile style, and some phones can handle the full skins.

Forcing a user to use a skin doesn't make sense to me. IMO, defaulting a mobile user's to a mobile theme makes sense, not giving them the option to change it doesn't.

Exactly what I was thinking. Glad to see dartho took some action on this.

Originally Posted by nNJ

As an idea for a future release (should you decide to make one) would be to make the "force" aspect of this mod a boolean, (am I phrasing this right?) so that users can turn it on/off in their admin cp's.

Exactly what I was suggesting. Would be something to look forward too.

[Sooner95]

Ok, I give up. ever since upgrading to 3.8.1 this has not worked. Now i am running 3.8.2 and still no good. I have removed it, reinstalled it, adjusted the settings, and still nothin.

I really like this addon, as do several of my users, but it's not doing us any good now.

also tried to put in a defined string for my phone..

TELECA-/2.0 (BREW 3.1.5; U; EN-US;SAMSUNG; SPH-M800; Teleca/Q05A/INT) MMP/2.0 Profile/MIDP-2.1 Configuration/CLDC-1.1

Still does not detect the mobile theme.

[dartho]

try adding just "SPH-M800" as a user defined useragent string and see how you go. I know it's obvious, but you also need to configure a style for the custom/user defined section and enable it ...