Archive for April, 2009

Mobile internet use is growing rapidly and the question ‘howto create a mobile version of my (Drupal) website?‘ is heard more and more often. Drupal offers different ways to provide mobile content for your users.

Strategies
The people at Siruna made a great slideshare to explain different possible strategies to handle mobile versions of your website. They also made the blog mobiledrupal.com with much more information on getting Drupal mobile.

These are the strategies:

1. creating a separate url for mobile and desktop content and a different theme
2. automatically redirect mobile users to the mobile theme
3. combine 1 and 2 and use mobile roles to select information

The advantage of having seperate url’s is giving users the ability to choose which version they prefer. This is a good thing because modern mobile devices can render normal webpages decently (and provide good user interaction using zoom and pan) and users might prefer to visit the ‘normal’ site this way.

The best flexibility is reached with option 3. This way, not only can you provide your mobile users a special layout, but you can also select which information they should see because they use a different role. Mobile users are still automatically redirected to the mobile url, with a different template, but can choose to go back to the normal site using a clearly visible link.

How?
You will need a detection method to guide your users to the desired layout/content. This can be achieved with the mobile tools module. This module detects the browser user agent and let’s you choose a mobile theme and/or seperate url’s for your mobile content, based on chosen options.

A good start point for a mobile theme could be ‘mobile‘  or ‘iUI‘. The latter displays your website in an ‘iphone like’ user interface using the User Interface Library for Safari development on iPhone. Of course, you could also use your original theme and restructure/restyle it to fit mobile screens. Either way you will probably customize the template to fit your needs.

Templating is one thing, but if you would like to present different content to your mobile users you will need to setup mobile roles (optional with the mobile tools module). That way, you can use the built-in permission system and create special content for your mobile visitors. For example a different frontpage and menu items.

WURFL
If you are a developer and want more, you might be interested in WURFL (Wireless Universal Resource Files). This module provides device capability detection as an API but you will need to setup the WURFL Library. It also integrates with mobile tools. You can read more about this here.

Links

iphone simulator

delicious.com/tdrycker/mobile+drupal

@twom on Twitter to get all the ins and outs on mobile Drupal.

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There is a lot going on to improve the UX for the next Drupal version. I didn’t get a chance to play around with Drupal 7 until yesterday. We had to enable PDO support (the new database object layer) but now it works like charm. One of the reasons we wanted to take it out for a spin was this request to test out the patch for vertical tabs which adds (and I quote) ’sexy awesomeness to Drupal’. Yeah baby!

D7ux.org
Drupal 7 will be all about improving the usability and user experience (or UX). Everybody is invited to participate through the special project website www.d7ux.org. This is where Mark and Leisa will work with the community to make Drupal even better.

Buzzr
The team at Lullabot is also busy showing off how frameworks are the new Dreamweaver. Their project is codenamed ‘Buzzr‘. This  ’software as a service’ concept will be enable users with no technical knowlodge to easily create their own Drupal. Watch this video for a demonstration.

Their work has a lot of overlap with d7ux.org. One major issue is improving the Drupal admin interface. It also shows some other interesting ideas and findings. For example how most normal users are confused by the term ‘blocks’ but have a clear picture what a ‘widget’ is. Something similar are nodes and pages. For most users the difference isn’t clear.

Interface improvements
It’s also about using the right interface at the right place. The popups module offers ajaxy lightbox dialogs which can be very useful to prevent the user from feeling lost in the admin environment. Another improvement is grouping related tasks (something which already better in the d7-dev version).

Also interesting is the idea of ‘features‘.  (proof of concept module here) For example: usually if you want to enable ratings on your Drupal site, you’ve got the install several modules, set them up and configure a lot of settings. With features you can simply enable ‘ratings’ on your website with on switch. Developers like us won’t care much for such settings because we ‘think’ in modules anyway. But well, you know… most people don’t.

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If you are using your website as a marketing tool, chances are high you will also want to send newsletters to your users as part of an e-mail marketing campaign. There are a lot of ways to do this. You will find companies who are specialized in e-mail marketing or others who offer on-line services.

Okay, you’ve got the third party services. But if you already use a Drupal powered website, you might prefer a tool which integrates with your CMS. And though the list of mail and messaging modules for Drupal might be long, there are only a few options if you need the basic functionality of a newsletter: sending bulk HTML email with specific content to a database of users.

Let’s take a quick comparison I made at three options: simplenews, mailout and mass_contact.

Mass contact is not really a ‘newsletter tool’. You can’t use it to send email to custom lists of poeple who aren’t available as users in your Drupal install. But it can be a very handy tool if you don’t need to have complex html-layouts and do want an easy way to mail your site members.

It’s also different in the way it sends the emails. With simplenews or mailout, cron takes care of sending batches of mail and thus hopefully preventing any triggers for SPAM. You can even use phpmailer (which integrates with mimemail) and use an SMTP server to send the email. Every email is send seperately. But mass_contact uses one email and adds all users as bCC email-addresses to the mail. You can limit the amount of bCC emails with a setting, to prevent server-side limitations and send several mails in batches.

Simplenews has excellent features and capabilities to style and brand an email template. The template files support CCK fields and modules like imagecache. Even more advanced is the ability to embed specific Views into the templates.

Simplenews has many extra features which are enabled with additional module plug-ins. But handling bounces, support for personalization (using Token) and role support are still in very early stages. In functionality, simplenews is not as powerful as  for example phplist. But it is much more user friendly and with Custom Content Types you can create a very managable workflow. However, opting in for a newsletter should require one click less.

Mailout leaves me with mixed feelings. It has some great features which make it easy to use right out-of-the-box, like support for roles and Organic Groups, but you have limited options for building a template. And somehow it’s now possible to view old newsletters. They are simply not saves as nodes.

The biggest problem: no Drupal 6 version yet. And looking at the issue list, it doesn’t seem like there will be one available soon.

Other methods of communication
There are a many other modules available for different types of automatic messaging or subscription notifications. The most popular are notifications, messaging (API), notify, comment_notify and commentmail. But you can also accomplish a lot of email notifications using rules in Drupal 6.

Third party integration
If you are using phplist, then phplist integration might be interesting. The same counts for iContact,  Campaignmonitor and Mailman.

Related articles:

• Drupal 6: communicating with your users

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