It's not an overstatement to say that handhelds have changed the world. What was, just 10 years ago, simply a phone is now the center of your online life and, for many users, their primary Internet device. The power of the smart phone is shaking up the world from Main Street and Wall Street to Pennsylvania Avenue and Downing Street.
Drupal is the perfect platform on which to build a mobile strategy. The power of millions of developers world-wide ensures that there's no problem you face that has not already been overcome by multiple developers and solved with any one of the hundreds of thousands of Drupal contributed projects.
Chapter 1, When is a Phone Not a Phone?, explains what we mean when we say "mobile." In this chapter, we'll take a look at the mobile platforms in use today and how they behave and render today's HTML standards.
Chapter 2, Setting up a Local Development Environment, teaches you to work in a team environment with version control and to create a local version of our site on Windows or Mac OS with Drush, Drush Make and a make file, and our standard open source PHP *AMP stack. It outlines a team workflow of building the code locally and pushing it to the live site.
Chapter 3, Selecting the Right Domain for your Mobile Site, guides you through setting up the Domain Access and Drupal Behaviors modules that redirect mobile and desktop browsers to the version of the website most appropriate for their client. In this chapter, we will learn to share content across sites without resorting to a multisite install.
Chapter 4, Introduction to a Theme, introduces the idea of progressive enhancement with CSS. In this chapter, we'll create a very simple HTML5 theme that will serve mobile clients with CSS Media Queries until a highly customized one can be devised.
Chapter 5, A Home with a View, demonstates the use of Context and Image Styles to create a customized view for the home page. In this chapter, we'll create a mobile-friendly menu and bundle it up into a feature that can push the new content to your live site in one fell swoop.
Chapter 6, The Elephant in the Room: Audio, Video, and Flash Media, teaches you to create a compelling audio and video experience without using Flash. It teaches you to create data visualization using data we've pulled from a View and the HighCharts JavaScript library.
Chapter 7, Location, Location, Location helps you to set up location services and cover some common use cases, as well as some uncommon ones using GMap, Location, Open Layers and Map Box.
Chapter 8, Services with a Smile, explores the Services module which serves up pieces of node content from a REST and/or SOAP API. In this chapter, we will leverage this module to add some interesting interactivity to our example site.
Chapter 9, Putting it Together, guides you in addding some advanced theming to your site and making the site more responsive to the various devices that will be accessing it.
Chapter 10, Tabula Rasa: Nurturing your site for tablets, explores the emerging tablet market and covers special design considerations and conventions for designing for tablet use.
Chapter 11, A Home in the Clouds, explores team deployment solutions such as Hudson/Jenkins, Features integration hooks and breaks down the go-live process to something that's repeatable and, with any luck at all, scriptable.
Appendix A, Pop Quiz Answers, contains the answers to all the pop quiz questions for all the chapters.
You'll need a Mac or PC to develop your website. Optionally, you might want to get an Amazon AWS account for the chapter on deployment.
This book is for the aspiring website developer as well as more experienced developers.
In this book, you will find several headings appearing frequently. To give clear instructions of how to complete a procedure or task, we use:
1. Action 1
2. Action 2
3. Action 3
Instructions often need some extra explanation so that they make sense, so they are followed with:
This heading explains the working of tasks or instructions that you have just completed.
You will also find some other learning aids in the book, including:
These are short multiple choice questions intended to help you test your own understanding.
These set practical challenges and give you ideas for experimenting with what you have learned.
You will also find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "Go to http://developer.java.com and search for the JDK developer download. It will be a .exe file. Run the installer "
A block of code is set as follows:
<VirtualHost *:80> ServerName dpk.local DocumentRoot "C:\cygwin\home\[YOUR USER NAME]\sites\dpk" <Directory "C:\cygwin\home\[YOUR USER NAME]\sites\dpk"> Options Includes FollowSymLinks AllowOverride All Order allow,deny Allow from all </Directory> </VirtualHost>
When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
core = "7.x" dependencies[] = "context" dependencies[] = "views" description = "Home page view" features[context][] = "Home Page" features[ctools][] = "context:context:3" features[ctools][] = "views:views_default:3.0" features[views_view][] = "home" name = "Drupallos Homepage"
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
cd ~/Sites
git clone git://github.com/drupal4mobile/dpk.git
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "We then need to create an Android Virtual Device. Click on the Virtual devices tab and then click on the New button".
Note
Tips and tricks appear like this.
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The code for this book is stored on GitHub at http://github.com/drupal4mobile/dpk and we'll use the GIT version control system throughout the book. I've organized the code for each chapter into a branch on GitHub. As this code is progressive from beginning to end, you can obtain the code for each chapter by checking out the GIT branch for that chapter. Feel free to fork any code on the repository and use it as you see fit. Any code in this book should be considered open source and released under the same license as Drupal.
After this book's publication I will attempt to take some of the custom modules used in the book to Drupal contrib module status. If I am successful, I will note such a change in the dpk.make file in the root of the install directory.
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