Forum Style - Lightweight Style for Small Screen Devices (cell phone, iphone, mobile, android)

A lightweight *forum only style aimed at small screen devices such as Windows Smartphones, Nokias and even iPhones. It has VERY low bandwidth requirements - 15 times less on my site - 20K as opposed to 300K for forumhome.

*forum only - I have done a very small amount of rough work on CMS templates, a simple single column CMS *could* be created to work with this style without too much effort. However I am not sure if you can have a different CMS layout dependent on which style you are using?

This is an update to the mobile style I have previously released.

The changes are predominantly aesthetic to take advantage of larger screens.

It is also much easier to change colour schemes by editing the commented CSS file.

Demo: http://vbdev.org/forum.php?styleid=7

This is a a lightweight style and as such has much reduced functionality/information over the default vBulletin style.

Install instructions:

• Firstly, if upgrading, I recommend installing this as a new style rather than overwriting your previous install. This way you get to test it first without trashing your existing style.
• BACKUP YOUR EXISTING lightweight.css.php FILE IF YOU HAVE CSS CUSTOMISATIONS
• Download ZIP file
• Unzip to a local/temp directory
• Edit lightweight.css.php file to customise colours if required
• Upload contents of the upload directory in the zip file folder to your forum root.
• Install style XML via Style Manager in your ADMINCP
• **Install and configure "LightWeight Style Options"
• See post 2 for a FAQ
• Click "Mark as Installed"
• Test it out
• Leave a rating
• Leave feedback
• Enjoy checking your site from your mobile phone without the need to pinch/zoom/wait etc...

Version Control:

1.0.0 - 25 AUG 2010 - Initial Release on vBulletin.org
1.0.1 - 26 AUG 2010 - Fixed "Mark All Forums Read" link in Search results. Released Lightweight Style Options to customise this
1.0.2 - 21 MAR 2011 - Updated to 4.1.2, removed short tags from CSS, fixed some issues discovered since last release, added some stuff.
1.0.3 - 16 DEC 2011 - Updated to 1.0.3, tried to fix all known issues. Nothing new. If you have updated your site as bugs have been found, probably no need to upgrade. But if you're upgrading your site from to 4.1.9, might be worthwhile.
1.0.3a - 16 DEC 2011 - remove test ad hook code accidently left in postbit_legacy template

Branding Free:

The style is free to use. However I ask that you keep links in the footer. If you want to remove them - send me a donation of an amount you can afford, or that you think is fair/reasonable, it's up to you how much.

[Phaedrus]

I'll give that a go, thanks. It appears to be working. I was able to scroll down on a huge post and add a reply. I hope this satisfies the users.

[Mark.B]

I just wanted to say a big "plus" for this style, I am using it (albeit somewhat modified) on my site and I consider it a far superior solution to the default vB one.

My demo is here:
http://www.bowlandcentral.com/forum/...hp?styleid=167

I've been tweaking and styling it a lot lately.

Current screenshots when logged in. These are taken in desktop Safari but setting the useragent as iPad, they actually look better in mobile Safari.

[dartho]

That's looking pretty sweet, Mark. You've got some nice tweaks there (and in your default style too) - I especially like what you've done with the header/navbar.

Also good to see vb4 is working for you, I still haven't made the leap from 3.8 to 4.x yet.... one of these days!

Thanks for sharing

[Mark.B]

Originally Posted by dartho

That's looking pretty sweet, Mark. You've got some nice tweaks there (and in your default style too) - I especially like what you've done with the header/navbar.

Also good to see vb4 is working for you, I still haven't made the leap from 3.8 to 4.x yet.... one of these days!

Thanks for sharing

Thanks Dartho. It's been a gradual evolution to get it to where I want, but I think the main style still has the "vB4 look", which is what I wanted to achieve.

The same is the case with the mobile style, I wanted the vB4 look (as far as possible). By adding avatars I have probably reduced the "lightweight" aspect a little but I was inspired by Invision's mobile style which looks rather good with them in place.

I think the balance is now good, I shall not add any further bloat to it.

Probably my next step on the mobile style, is that I was lazy and hard coded some of the CSS into the templates, I need to transfer that out into the css file, which will then allow me to offer different coloured variants like I do with the main style. Haven't really worked out the best way to marry that in with auto-detection though. Currently I have a custom user field that allows people to override the auto detection (mainly for people with iPads...adding the iPad useragent to the exclusion fields seem to fail and as I don't have an iPad I can't easily troubleshoot that) but it's far from ideal, the cookies keep sticking because they are in the URLs.....

[Kolbi]

perhaps Dartho keeps some modifications you did?

[Mark.B]

Originally Posted by Kolbi

perhaps Dartho keeps some modifications you did?

Well they aren't difficult but some of them are less "lightweight" than perhaps was intended for this style, particularly with regard to using avatars.

Most of my changes are simply minor restyling of the basics of this style, for instance using the windowbg class to put boxes round everything, and then adding a couple of elements from the main style to make things look consistent (eg those quote boxes are the same ones I use in the main style).

[big dan]

Thanks for this style. It's a great option to have. I just upgraded to 4.1.3, is it safe to revert all the templates that need attention?

[dartho]

yep, should be

[gopherhockey]

I had an older version of a mobile template and a mobile device detection script. With the most recent vBulletin upgrade, it appears they have their own mobile template and so everything has been reverted.

Users now complain that its unusable.

Is this a different template other than "mobile" and how does a user actually use it.

How does this compare to the recent mobile software that was released officially for vBulletin?

Right now our mobile options are a mess unless someone is using tap-a-talk.

[dartho]

With 4.1.2, vbulletin have put in their own detection script - I suggest as a start you disable your previous one.

The vBulletin Mobile Style is written for webkit based browsers, so will work on iPhones and Android based phones, but may not display well on other devices.

This style should work for pretty much all devices. As for which one is better, that's subjective - they would both have their positives and negatives.

As a start, you could install this one and also use vBulletins Mobile style and configure the vBulletin mobile detect options in Style & Language Settings to use vBulletin's Mobile style for 'Modern Browsers' and this one for 'Old Mobile Browsers' - although personally I'd configure them both to use this style Best bet is to get your users feedback and see what they like