Bridging the Gap Between Desktop and Mobile Publishing with Drupal

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While mobile websites are becoming a commodity, many developers still struggle with the task of connecting their Drupal sites with the mobile and tablet world. Thousands of desktop focused sites have been build in the past years, and many of them are now facing the challenge of adding a mobile strategy. The fact that Drupal is at this point primarily a desktop focused CMS, the technical solutions for adding this mobile layer are not always straightforward. The question can be asked if the Drupal CMS is holding us back or can we use Drupal to our advantage?

To date, several of ad hoc techniques have been developed to make the transition easier. Many of them are being bundled within the Mobile Tools module, and other techniques make use of already available modules such as context, panels, views and services.

After building several mobile websites, and native apps, we learned that several mobile strategies that can be chosen:

  • Lowest common denominator sites that run on the widest range of devices.
  • Mobile websites optimized for the latest browsers.
  • Mobile apps that can be purchased in app stores.

All of these strategies have their place in the current web ecosystem, but have different requirements.

This session will focus on the underlying mechanisms of Drupal that can help you in extending your current desktop offer mobile or to create a new Drupal strategy that incorporates mobile from the start.

This sessions will cover following topics:

  • What is a mobile content strategy and how to choose one.
  • Creating (scalable) architectures with Drupal that support your mobile strategy.
  • Drupal core functionality and contrib modules that help in creating a mobile website or native app.

This session would be highly complementary with any theming oriented session that discusses mobile design, user experience and javascript frameworks.

About the author:
Tom has been dealing with Drupal and mobile sites since 2008 and has seen the focus shift from transcoding desktop sites that work on low end devices to creating HTML5 and CSS3 based webapps that run only on the latest browsers. In an effort to bring Drupal closer to the mobile web, Tom has maintained the Mobile Tools module and blogs about mobile on mobiledrupal.com. Currently Tom is Senior Consultant at Northpoint Solutions where he continues his focus on mobile web development.

Intended audience

This session is targeted to Drupal architects and developers.

Questions answered by this session

What is a mobile strategy?

How to choose a mobile strategy?

How to use Drupal as a mobile CMS?

What functionality is provided by mobile tools?

Which challenges are ahead?

Comments (1)

This is going to be a *great*

This is going to be a *great* presentation!! Don't miss it!!!

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