GoMobile is a Plone add-on product to turn Plone to converged web and mobile content management system
Project description
GoMobile is a Plone add-on product to turn Plone to converged web and mobile content management system. It aims to be the leading open source solution for mobile and converged content management. This is achieved by not making compromises on mobile site usability.
Features
Note: GoMobile is still under development. Some of these features might require extra work to be enabled in your configuration.
Automatically reformat pages and images suitable for mobile consumption.
Degenerate gracefully when viewing the pages on less powerful mobile phones (other than webkit based browser)
Manage web and mobile content from the same user interface.
Mobile phone preview option for pages in the admin interface.
Categorize site sections belonging to web, mobile or both (gomobile.convergence product)
Possible to use same URLs for web and mobile content. This way pages are displayed correctly whether the user opens them from his web browser or mobile browser. Very handy for outgoing links in email.
Big folder navigation and link buttons for touch screen displays to make the mobile site finger friendly.
Superious handset database support, sourcing information from multiple handset databases.
Enable and disable site features depending on whether the handset supports them (location based services, downloadable ringtones, downloadable widgets).
Plone ecosystem has dozens of well maintained add-ons which can be dropped in to your mobile sites: forums, form editors, blogs, ecommerce.
Built on Plone and Zope component architecture to make the product extensible, configurable and future proof.
Upload video files and they will be automatically transcoded suitable for different web and mobile platforms (commercial add on service)
Feel it
Please visit Plone community mobile site to see the product in action.
The site achieves near perfect score in mobiReady industry standard test how well pages work across different mobile phones.
Requirements
Experience or will to learn how to install and maintain Plone sites
Plone 3.3 or later
Installation
You need to install Plone CMS first.
External Set up
Out-of-the-box setup needs special DNS set-up to work correctly.
There are three different request types: web, mobile and preview
Different domain names are used to identify the request type
URI stays same
Edit your /etc/hosts and add line:
127.0.0.1 mobi.localhost web.localhost preview.localhost
Optional: It is possible to configure the server to use only single domain name. In this case, mobile sessions are identified by user agent sniffing and preview requests are identified by a path prefix.
buildout.cfg
Installation of GoMobile source codes is buildout recipe based.
Source code can be checked out from Google Code.
Example configuration below:
# Add additional eggs here
eggs =
archetypes.schemaextender
gomobile.imageinfo
gomobile.mobile
gomobile.convergence
# These are direct SVN trunk checkouts
develop =
../workspace/gomobile/gomobile.imageinfo
../workspace/gomobile/gomobile.mobile
../workspace/gomobile/gomobile.convergence
# If you want to register ZCML slugs for any packages, list them here.
# e.g. zcml = my.package my.other.package
zcml =
archetypes.schemaextender
gomobile.imageinfo
gomobile.mobile
gomobile.convergence
Add on product installers
Run add on product installers for
Plone Mobile
Mobile content convergence (only needed if you indent to use your site to serve both web and mobile content)
Site specific settings
Site specific settings can be found in ZMI. Go portal_properties -> mobile_properties.
See gomobile.mobile/profiles/default/propertiestool.xml for settings descriptions.
Mobile support
The product has been tested with
iPhone
Various Nokia Series 40 (non-webkit browsers)
Various Nokia Series 60 models
BlackPerry models
Android
Opera Mini
Usage
To view web site version, go http://web.localhost.
To view mobile site version, go http://mobi.localhost.
Portlets
The following new portlets are available:
Mobile preview portlet: render the current page in mobile phone mock up. This generates preview request to the site in pop-up iframe.
Content medias portlet: allow to choose in which medias the content appears: web, mobile, both or use the parent folder setting.
Sitemap
Sitemap has been enhanced to show content media and content language for the site administrators.
Extended schema
All Plone content types will be retrofitted with the following new fields
contentMedia: convergence options - whether the content should appear in web, mobile or both. This setting can be inherited from parent levels. Usually you do not wish to query contentMedia directly, instead use gomobile.convergence.ConvergedMediaFilter utility functions.
mobileFolderListing: Show mobile specific folder listing for this content [deprecated].
Mobile request discriminating
gomobile.mobile.discriminator contains an utility which categorizes the incoming HTTP requests to web, mobile and preview requests.
By default, this uses domain name based policy. You can override this to use user agent based policy or cookie based policy.
Note that monkey patching hacks are used to set subdomain cookie: Plone login is valid for web.localhost, mobi.localhost and preview.localhost domains. If you use ZMI login this does not work.
Mobile theme layer
If discriminator detects a mobile or preview request mobile theme is activated. This is a normal Plone theme, identified by its name.
Mobile theme name is specified in portal_properties -> mobile_properties.
For the sake of simplicity, CSS files are hardcoded in the mobile main template gomobile/mobile/skins/mobile_base/main_template.pt and Plone’s CSS registry is ignored for mobile.
Mobile aware and convergence aware base viewlets are available in gomobile.convergence.browser and gomobile.mobile.browser packakges.
How to export mobile viewlet settings
Go to plone_skins, set your mobile skin as a default theme
Go to portal_setup, export viewlets
Go to plone_skins, put the normal theme back
Viewlet configuration
Mobile theme layer has its own viewlet configuration.
To rearrange mobile theme viewlets, go http://mobi.localhost/@@manage-viewlets
Image resizing
Images can be automatically resized to fit for mobile screen. The following options are availble
Scale by maximum screen width (good for logos)
Scale by maximum screen height
Manually enforce dimensions
Please see gomobile.mobile.browser.resizer for more information about this functionality.
User agent sniffing
To achieve the maximum usability mobile pages must be tailored for each handset individually. This means
Resizing images suitable for the handset small or big screen resolution
Serving correct video files depending on the handset support (RTSP, 3G, iPhone MP4 progressive download and such)
Change link and button sizes depending whether the handset is touchscreen based or keypad based
Disable site features depending on whether the handset supports them (downloadable map locations, ringtones, wallpapers)
Use location based information when available
State of the art mobile.sniffer library is used in this project. It is an generic middleware supporting several different handset databases. To make the sniffing more accurate, sniffing can source information from multiple databases once.
Traffic analyzing
Traffic analyzing can be either
internal: you record page hits your own database
external: hidden image loaded from the tracker server is used to keep track of the loaded pages and the visitor data is hosted elsewhere
The former is more visitor friendly, since there is no hidden images increasing mobile bandwidth usage. The latter is more easier for the site administrators.
Supported tracking backends:
SQL and cookie based tracking (not released yet)
Performance
archetypes.schemaextender has performance issues.
If this is an issue please install archetypes.schematuning package.
Unit tests
Unit tests are available for all packages.
Roadmap
gomobile.mobile theme will be rewritten based on plonecommunity.mobi
Launch GoMobile community in GetPaid fashion
Recruit sponsors/clients
Build the best mobile content management system in the world
History
This project started as an internal Twinapex effort and was test-driven on few sites before becoming public. To embrace the open source and make this product a great success we decided to spin off it.
0.0.1 - 0.0.2
Migrated to Plone 3.3
Created plonecommunity.mobi demo site
Increased mobiready.com score to to near perfect by fixing template quirks: http://plonecommunity.mobi/readiness.png
Added Bango support
0.0.1
Source code liberation
Release history Release notifications | RSS feed
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