Thread:Pecoes/@comment-4190137-20121118091022/@comment-3508190-20121119112558

There's nothing special you need to do. The MediaWiki software has a skin for mobile devices and whenever someone with an iPhone or an Android device requests one of your pages it will be wrapped in that skin instead of Oasis (the default skin). Unless there's lots and heaps of extremely fancy stuff on the page, the result will look fine without any action on your part.

Simply attach "?useskin=wikiamobile" to the URL to view the mobile version of any page on your wiki. You should also downsize your browser window to get an idea what the page would look like.

Just as random examples, here are the latest four entries from the "Recent WikiActivity" box:


 * http://merlin.wikia.com/wiki/Alvarr?useskin=wikiamobile
 * http://merlin.wikia.com/wiki/Morgana_Pendragon?useskin=wikiamobile
 * http://merlin.wikia.com/wiki/Gaius%27_Grimoire?useskin=wikiamobile
 * http://merlin.wikia.com/wiki/Camelot?useskin=wikiamobile

As you can see they all look fine on mobile devices - albeit quite different. They could maybe do with a custom background e.g. But, really, they look fine. You needn't do anything.

So the question is not so much what you need to do, but what you shouldn't do. A three-column layout like most Wikia main pages use, will translate poorly to mobile devices. All that JavaScript stuff - like the polls - doesn't seem to work on mobile pages either.

It's possible, that the fancy stuff can be made to work. But I would have to find that out the hard way. That's why I would appreciate it, if you spend a little time to think carefully about what a scaled down version of your front page absolutely definitely positively needs.

And, seriously, you need to scale down your main page! There are too many images, too many scripts, too many stylesheets, etc. It takes one or two seconds for my desktop browser to load the whole thing. A mobile device has only a fraction of the download speed my desktop has. Ideally the mobile main page should have only two or three images and no youtube clips, polls and whatnot.

So start a regular article, name it "Mobile Merlin Wiki" or somesuch and pretend you were writing an article about your wiki.

I will set up two JavaScript redirects. One for mobile users on the main page that leads to the mobile main page and one for regular users on the mobile main page that leads to the regular main page.