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Updated! My review of Drupal 7 Mobile Web Development

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I just picked up my copy of Drupal 7 Mobile Web Development and I must say that from start to finish it's packed full of useful, practical and relevant information. From the first chapter on "When is a Phone not a Phone?" straight through to the final chapter on on "A Home in the Clouds", Stovall writes in a very readable, engaging style with logical headings, pop quizzes and actions.

Chapter 1: "When a Phone is not a Phone?"
This chapter documents the evolution of phones from "dumb" phones into "smart" and even "smart-er" phones and the role that HTML standards and CMSes like Drupal have played and can play in optimizing users' experiences on these devices. He covers the development of WAP as well as WebKit and the similarities and differences between the various mobile OSs. He briefly covers the advent of tablets and explains that "mobile" is a context-driven thing based on the context of the user, not the machine. He then goes into how to setup devel environments for both iOS and Android and mentions some mobile simulators.

*Chapter 2: "Setting up a Local Development Environment"
Here Stovall goes over the basics of setting up a development environment for Drupal that follows best practices and uses a sample site example to guide the reader. Topics include: Drush and Drush Make, SCM (GIT, SVN), AMP/WAMP/MAMP stack and others. This chapter alone is worth buying the book for as it's essential to get this part right.
*Note: The author, Tom Stovall, asked me to post a link to this blog post on his blog as part of the intsall process for Drush changed post-publication of this book. Here is the post.

Chapter 3: "Selecting the Right Domain for your Mobile Site"
This chapter covers design issues and how to manage domains for serving same content to different host domains with different Drupal designs (themes). It also covers some aspects of backing up, migrating and deployment of mobile designs as well as how to use a User Acceptance Testing (UAT) environment.

Chapter 4: "Introduction to a Theme"
This chapter covers theming in Drupal 7 (versus Drupal 6) for mobile environments including the changes HTML5 brings to this process and "progressively enhancing" a mobile site. This chapter also covers, albeit somewhat surprisingly, semantic concepts and RDF and how these standards interact with HTML5 and a section on redirecting users to the mobile version of your site with Javascript, among other topics.

Chapter 5: "A Home with a View"
This chapter discusses strategies for homepage design in a mobile environment including modules that assist with this process.

Chapter 6: "The Elephant in the Room: Audio, Video and Flash Media"
This chapters covers dealing with multimedia files and streaming in a mobile environment including the Media module and strategies for dealing with media files in different mobile environments and on different devices and how HTML5 and CSS3 will change the playing field.

Chapter 7: "Location, Location, Location"
This chapter is about using the Location and GMap modules and other tools to create a rich mobile experience for users with geolocation information and interactivity.

Chapter 8: "Services with a Smile"
This chapter covers web services mainly focusing on REST with JSON data within the Services module where SOAP and other protocols and formats are also supported.

Chapter 9: "Putting it Together"
This chapter brings it all together to publish a live, mobile site using build modes and the Display Suite module as well as jQuery Mobile and its AJAX features and dealing with fonts and launching the site.

Chapter 10: "Tabula Rasa: Nurturing your Site for Tablets"
This chapter covers the history of tablets and how "touch events" differ from mouse events. Stovall covers adaptive web page designs and using CSS for multiple use cases.

Chapter 11: "A Home in the Clouds"
This final chapter covers setting up a virtual hosting account and related "cloud-based" issues. Topics include using RightSpace virtual host management, cloning servers, code deployment with Jenkins and GitHub and other related issues.

We only have experience with one Drupal 7 site so far and have sruggled a bit to optimize it for mobile devices.  After reading Stovall's book, I feel better-prepared to tackle the mobile development tasks ahead. I highly recommend this book to anyone working with Drupal websites.

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