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

[Jah-Hools]

Seems all very exciting..!!

A few questions before I jump in please.

1) If forum moderators use Iphones and Blackberrys can they still do all their moderation tasks? (Delete as spam, moderate threads, Soft delete, hard delete, ban users, move threads, merge threads etc)

2) Is there any reason a member already using an Iphone to post on the forum would be unhappy if they were suddenly forced to use the dedicated Iphone style? Or should they all jump for joy?

3) Conceptual comprehension problem.. Is this a "one stop' set up for Iphone, Windows Mobile, and Blackberry viewing? - or do I also have to go get and install those individual style templates myself? (in other words - Is this a 'style router' or does it take care of everything - device detection and style templates.)

Many thanks!

[dartho]

This is just a "style router" and can detect most mobile devices. It can also differentiate 'Windows CE' and iPhone devices and assign defined styles to these devices if you wish.

Moderation tasks are taken care of in styles, not this. Given the stripped back nature of mobile styles I doubt you'll have anything but basic delete posts/threads moderation tools.

Your iphone users may jump for joy if they pay a premium for bandwidth and you force them to a low bandwidth style, but that will come at a loss of functionality - I'm sure they'll let you know

[Jah-Hools]

Ahh, Ok I get it!

Many thanks for explaining..

Would it be uncool of me to ask where to get the styles from to use with this?

Iphone
Blackberry (but "mobile view" seems to work fine)
Windows Mobile
(any others needed? Palm?)

Can you (or anyone) advise / suggest a configuration that would be good to run with? My forum members are quite geeky, hip to technology, so quite a lot of PDAs in use..

Sorry for being so lame..

Thanks

[dartho]

All the ones I know of are listed in the first post :up:

I'd go with mine first for all devices Then see what they say from there...

the Elforro one looks real purty, your iPhone users may like that. It might work OK for PDA's too

[Jah-Hools]

oops! Thanks, missed that.. Doh!

[EvilJohn]

Thanks, installed.

[lim(x?-5x?) = ∞]

Whats ther difference between "Enable This Product?" and "Enable Mobile Device Detection?" options?

[dartho]

You can have mobile device detection disabled (Nokia, Ericsson phones etc), and iPhone and/or Windows CE Device detection enabled.

Or disable the entire product

[Ted S]

Again.... great addon and skin. I've spent some time customizing the skin for my particular sites [as everyone probably should] and my users are loving it. Every site needs to use this.

[dartho]

Thanks. Here's hoping vBulletin do something about being mobile friendly out of teh box come version 4!