Open Beta: Artodia Mobile Style

[Hirazi Blue]

Introducing a new mobile style named “Artodia: Mobile and SEO” for mobile device access.

Basically this is just another forum style (like our current two options: subsilver2 and subsilver_black)
and you choose it from the UCP > Board preferences > Edit global settings > Board Style.
It doesn’t have the "look and feel" of our “regular” si-community (spoiler alert: it's ugly IMHO!). It isn’t even based on the same basic style, this one is based on “prosilver”, our own styles are based on “subsilver”. There might be room for some improvement concerning the colors used, but only if someone comes up with a good replacement.
As a mobile style you lose the Smilies Panel and the Color Panel in the post editor, but it should function with all of our custom BBCodes. The main difference between this style and our own is that most of the work is done with icons, not with text.

artodia.jpg

The icons above denote (from left to right):
1 Go to page number
2 Search
3 General Tools

As our forum software doesn’t allow us to open this for a small subset of our users, consider this an open beta. There might be room for some improvement, but be warned: not for much…

And if you don't know my position of mobile device access yet & why I don't think it necessarily needs to follow the regular "look & feel", I invite you to read this little rant of mine...
;)

Feedback, people, feedback!!! ;)

[csaez]

Cool!
The new one seems work a lot better on my smartphone but I don't want to use it on my laptop, is there any way set a theme per device?

[Hirazi Blue]

Automatic switching isn't possible ATM, I'm afraid...

edit 2:
I've disabled my initial workaround and edit (URL-based "?style=" switching) again, as csaez rightfully noticed in the next post, the style called that way doesn't persist, for some mysterious (to me, at least) reason, making it pretty useless, sadly. Will have to look for an alternative solution.

[csaez]

Perfect!
I will try that, thanks

Edit:
Sorry to bother you again but there's a bug with the workaround, seems like the new variable take a default value on links and the style isn't persistent

[rray]

I like it, despite some drawbacks it's got some clever solutions on low res smartphones (~240*400) for images, menus, . . those all work fine! Would probably prefer it over tapatalk if I had a smartphone

[Hirazi Blue]

First of all: mobile device access might be intermittently (and without further notice) disrupted for short times today, as I must test something that works on my local shadow install of the si-community, but doesn't yet seem to work on our "real" server.

BUT, more importantly - I NEED FEEDBACK URGENTLY. It would be possible theoretically to detect if our community is being viewed from a mobile device and automatically set the style to the new mobile style, while changing back when you're back on the desktop. Like I said I've got this to work with my local install (and my nifty new Opera Mobile Emulator) , but must debug this to get it to work on our "real" community. So my question is this: does this sound like a good idea (mobile style automatically when a mobile device is detected) or shouldn't I bother?

[csaez]

A tablet is a mobile device?
Give power to the user is always the best option, I'm not a big fan of this kind of automatism.

What about use a cookie to override the style preference?
Maybe something like this?

[Hirazi Blue]

Okay, I'm officially stumped. I've been trying all afternoon to get the modification csaez suggested in the previous post working on my local mirror install of the si-community, but several tries so far only resulted in several different things going wrong. For now I give up. I hope the new Artodia Mobile Style is usable without a mobile detect feature. I will try to figure out what's going on, but that might take some time...

[Hirazi Blue]

Another day of testing resulted in another big fat zilch.
Today I tried to get another mobile detection scheme running,
but this time it worked on my local si-community, but not on the real one.

Sorry for the short disruption in your si-community enjoyment today.
For now all testing has ended. At a later date, maybe...

I now declare "mobile detection" an impossibility (for me to implement)
and now will try to salvage what's left of my weekend...

[Hirazi Blue]

CODA: as an afterthought, now that the whole device detection didn't work out, I reinstated the style change via the URL, as it might help the mobile device users some, even if the style doesn't always persist. You can now easily bookmark https://www.si-community.com/forum/index.php?style=8 to get you into the si-community with the Artodia style directly. After logging on, you'd have to repeat that procedure.

With a URL ending in ".php", add "?style=" plus a number to the URL, with a URL ending in anything else, add "&style=" plus a number:

The numbers are:
2 for subsilver2
7 for subsilver_black
8 for Artodia Mobile & SEO

URLs ending with "#p=" followed by a post ID don't work for this, you'd have to discard the "#p=" part before adding the "&style="

Like we've established: this doesn't work perfectly, but as it might help out on a very small screen, I've decided to reinstate this little feature...

That's it folks: no more phpBB modifications for me until I recovered from last weekend and that might take a while...