Mobile Alabama Lite

This is my "down to the roots" version of vbMechanics' Mobile Alabama style. The goal was to cut all but the most necessary functions and optimize forum experience for simplest devices like mobile phones, old PDAs and the like.
The work on the style is not finished yet, but I deem the major part done:

• Most used templates like Forum Home, Forum Display, Show Thread, User CP, Search, Private Messaging etc were minimized, awful messy table layouts cut mercilessly and replaced with simple div/span whenever possible
• CSS stylesheet optimized not to include unused style definitions
• JavaScript was removed whenever I found it
• Templates were updated to work with 3.8.4
• Fully phrased with one additional phrase, see below
• Small plugin is used to adjust some board-wide settings for mobile users, see below.

All testing was done on WM PDA with 320x240 display in portrait mode. As result, Forum Home template with 27 categories/forums now generates 5.2kb HTML plus 2.05kb CSS, 7.24kb overall first page landing download. Forum Display generates around 8kb of HTML code, typical Show Thread is about 11kb. Pretty light and nice IMHO.

Demo is available here: link.

Install it as usual, and then go to Languages & Phrases -> Phrase Manager and add phrase "mobile_pms" with text "PMs: {1} unread, {2} total", all without double quotes of course.

An additional plugin is used to adjust the following board-wide options:

• Depth of Forums - Forum Home
• AJAX Features
• DHTML Popup Menus
• Quick Reply
• Quick Edit
• Multi Quote
• Editor Mode
• Thread Tagging
• Forum Description
• Show Users Browsing Forums
• Maximum Displayed Posts Before Page Split
• Instant Messaging Support
• Default Private Messages Per-Page
• Who's Online
• Number of Pages Visible in Page Navigator
• Show Instant Messaging Program Icons
• Add Template Name in HTML Comments

JavaScript and AJAX related features are disabled, and numbers of displayed posts/pms/pagenav are adjusted to better fit smaller screens. This plugin is completely optional as there is no support for these advanced features in style templates, but generating extra code that won't be used is not a good idea either. Anyway, if you would like to use the plugin, install it as usual and then edit it to change style id in "if" conditional to whatever number is used for Mobile Alabama Lite style on your board.

Suggestions/corrections/additions/bug reports are always welcome.

Please note that at this point the style is in beta stage, it may contain bugs and is not recommended for live forums. I have installed it on my own live forum though, and am having my users help me with troubleshooting. I hope all major bugs are already found but cannot guarantee it so please be careful.

Update history:

Version 0.5

• Adjusted for more compatibility with Mobile Safari browser - now the skin should display in proper sized font on iPhone and Android-based devices.
• Small fixes here and there.

Version 0.4

• Changed threadbit so now it displays threads with unread messages in bold with a button-like link to first unread message.
• Rewrote PM templates, ought to be usable now.
• Most used templates were fixed to be valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional.

Version 0.3 - Fixed absence of miscellaneous options in editpost, newreply and newthread templates. Because of that, no signatures were shown in messages posted from this style.

Version 0.2 - Fixed bugs in editpost and newreply templates. Made some small adjustments.

Version 0.1 - Initial beta offering.

[ekool]

Thank you for putting this skin together, using it and loving it!

[i13]

Hey thanks for the wonderful theme.
I think recaptcha is not working because javascript is disabled. How to get that working?

[nohuhu]

i13,

Oops, don't know what to do about recaptcha. First, I don't have it - means I can't test it; second, this Lite style was supposed to be as simple as it possible, without JavaScript or other fancy stuff. The idea is, it should run fine on older and cheaper devices that probably wouldn't support JavaScript anyway. Is it not so?

Regards,
nohuhu.