Mobile Web Junkie

Content Management Systems – it seems as though they are the in-vogue tool at the moment with every man and his dog developing one or using it to power their website.

If you do a search in a well known popular search engine for “CMS” (and assuming you aren’t searching for the Church Mission Society), you’ll find Joomla at #3. With 139 million returned results that’s not bad by anyone’s standards.

As well as that, anyone publishing a list of the top five or ten CMS’s can’t fail to include Joomla. It’s had over 10 million downloads and is used on websites from travel companies in Hawaii, hotel reservation systems in Belgium to everything in between. I’m sure at one point NASA has used it for various sites so if it’s good enough for Buzz Aldrin and his chums it’s good enough for me.

Joomla on mobile?

Joomla Demo Site on Mobile

But what does Joomla provide out of the box for your mobile visitors?

Not a great deal is the short answer. I tried to access the Joomla demo site on a couple of handsets – you can see the results on the screenshots to the left.

It’s the usual story of having to view web pages in your tiny mobile window, painfully slow downloads and an awful user experience. You’ll remember that this is the same sorry tale faced by millions of WordPress bloggers until I released a mobile plugin for it, so to even things up a bit in the battle of the CMS’s, I’ve written a mobile plugin for Joomla. WordPress 1 – 1 Joomla (Drupal 0 but more on that later!). Learn more about the reasons why you need to optimize to mobile devices here.

The usual rules apply – it’s free for non-commercial (plus ‘free to try’ for commercial) and you need to sign up for a Wapple dev key to use it. But once installed, you won’t ever have to worry about your mobile visitors again as the plugin takes care of everything for you.

Joomla Mobile Plugin Options

Graphics are resized dynamically to suit the handset, menu’s are configurable as are a whole bunch of image options – there’s even somewhere to input your newly acquired dev key!

Worried about your site being Search Engine Friendly? You should be and you’ve probably installed a plugin to help you out. But what about mobile – you don’t want to have to go through the whole process again. Fear not as my plugin retains all URLs from web to mobile allowing you to promote one single domain and have Google spider a single set of website addresses.

Older phones are catered for as much as newer ones – it’ll look as good as is humanly possible on an old WML browser and will look stunning on a swanky new iPhone. With regards to styles, the plugin tries to replicate the look and feel of the selected website theme so you’ll only need a little bit of CSS tinkering to achieve fantastic results.

The MDA

I’ll write a post at a later date that describes in infinite detail the nitty gritty of how it all comes together, but if you want to see it in action, head over to www.themda.org -  it’s already being powered by our Joomla plugin! There is a screenshot to the right too of how it looks on mobile.

Get the Joomla Mobile Web Plugin!

If you’ve got a Joomla powered website and fancy getting a copy of my plugin and template, check out the plugins section of our site and download it for yourself!

Here’s a quick reminder of why you would want to mobilize your Joomla site:

• Will fit perfectly to every screen
• Future proof for bigger or more obscure displays
• 5% of website traffic now gets hit by mobile devices (read more)
• Retains SEO for mobile and keeps your URLs SEF
• Single domain promotion for both web and mobile (read more)

Related posts:

1. How WordPress Developers can Mobilize their Plugins
2. You Can Have Your Cake and Mobilize It
3. How I Mobilized WordPress – the Technical Howto for Devs, Coders, Web Geeks and Wizards
4. IE6 Must Die, Mobile Browsers Must Live
5. Code, Don’t Transcode for Mobile Web