Bridging the gap between Desktop and Mobile publishing with Drupal

In a couple of months the Drupal community, and businesses will attend Drupalcon London 2011. An opportunity for us developers to learn about new trends, decision makers to evaluate Drupal and for a lot of Drupal pro's the opportunity to share knowledge with a wider community. I am looking forward to share my experiences on Mobile development with Drupal.

Each year, I propose a talk about something general called "Mobile Drupal", something I have been working on for a couple of years now and that has mainly resulted in the Mobile Tools module.

This year I choose to narrow down my proposal to a talk about techniques that Drupal module developers and site builders can use to prepare their existing desktop site for mobile. When you master this, you definitely are able to create a mobile site from scratch. So no extensive talk about javascript frameworks, and mobile user experience/design this year. Although this would also make an interesting session, this is something that goes much wider than just the Drupal community.

Currently many challenges exist in creating a mobile variant of your desktop site. Since Drupal is mainly desktop oriented, a lot of techniques are put in place to configure 1 display of your site. And to date,thousands of sites have been build with only "desktop" in mind. So how are we going to convert all those sites do mobile without having to rebuild them.
Under the hood Drupal allows some flexibility to configure your site for multiple display without the need for huge refactoring... And this is what my session will be about.
Some topics I really would like to cover are:

• How to easily change formatting of your nodes on mobile?
• How to make and configure mobile contexts for your pages?
• How to make panels mobile aware?
• How to create mobile alternatives for your views while maintaining paths?
• What modules hook into mobile contexts?
• How to use imagecache to scale images for mobile?
• How to create separate mobile navigation, while reusing the menu system?
• How to cache both your mobile and desktop site?
• How to make your own device detection and theme switching algorithm?
• ....

There are many techniques available that help you in adapting your Drupal site for mobile, so I would like to demonstrate some of the techniques that can fit a 1 hour session :)

I hope that together with this 'developer oriented' session, we will also see a couple of sessions related to mobile user experience, mobile design and related several mobile frameworks that are around there...

So if you would be interested in this session, please head over to the Drupalcon website and you know what to do there ;)!

Bridging the gap between Desktop and Mobile publishing with Drupal