Mobile Joomla! 1.2 with Joomla! 3.0 Support

Wednesday, 10 October 2012 00:00

We just released Mobile Joomla! 1.2, Mobile Joomla! Pro 1.2 and updates to our mobile extensions. Updates mean a lot of new and exciting features:

Joomla! 3.0 Support

Joomla! 3.0 was released recently with a lot of new features, and one of them is support of Bootstrap CSS framework. Using this framework it’s possible to create web UI that adapts different screen sizes (like responsive templates). Joomla! 3.0 includes two such templates: protostar for frontend and isis for backend.

If you read our article about Responsive Templates with Mobile Joomla!, you probably noticed that sooner or later, having a pure client-side website layout adaptation will not satisfy those who look for a better than great mobile user experience. Mobile Joomla! can also be used to truly optimize your Joomla! website performance on mobile, regardless of the Joomla! version you use. With Joomla! 3.0, in addition, we look forward to more standardized extension development guidelines, which hopefully will make it easier to support a wider variety of extensions on mobile, something that has been quite time consuming until now.

To quickly sum up, using Mobile Joomla! with Joomla! 3.0 and responsive templates means following benefits;

1. Significantly lower page sizes: Mobile Joomla! will serve the best possible images for a mobile device, which means significantly less data, faster page loading times and eventually more visiting time on site, more pageviews, and lower bounce rate. For advanced users, "retina" or HiDef images are also supported by Mobile Joomla Pro without any additional JavaScript-based solutions.
2. Custom mobile homepage: Easily serve a custom page for your mobile visitors, increase your conversions and avoid problems with extensions that are not mobile friendly.
3. Custom mobile title: With Mobile Joomla! you can set a custom title on mobile. This means better SEO, as well as handy for those who'd like to add your site on their home screen or bookmarks.
4. Built-in mobile testing: With Mobile Joomla Pro you can use built-in simulators to test your site design on Samsung Galaxy Note, iPhone 4, iPad, Nokia 3510i and NEC N341i.

Note: JComments Mobile Joomla! Extension and Kunena Mobile Joomla! Extension don't work with Joomla 3.0, as the parent extensions are not Joomla 3.0 compatible as of now.

Extensions Manager

One of the reasons Joomla! is very popular is likely because of its simplicity and versatile extensions. Currently there are more than 10,000 extensions in the Joomla! Extensions Directory. Some of these extensions work well in mobile browsers, some require minor changes in CSS to make them look nice, but at the same time there are many extensions that work well on desktop only. And most of such extensions are just simple content sharing buttons, lightboxes, etc.

With Mobile Joomla, it's very easy to exclude some modules from the mobile template since mobile templates have another set of module positions. But what to do if this extension is a plugin that is run on every page? Or what to do if you use a responsive template, and the same modules are displayed in both the desktop and the mobile versions? Or you would like to display a QR code on desktop, but hide it on mobile?

They were tricky questions, but with this Mobile Joomla! release we have implemented a new feature that allows to disable modules and/or plugins on mobile pages.

Here's how it works:

Extensions Manager Menu

Extensions Manager view

Pretty neat, huh? We thought so as well.

There is one only limitation: it's impossible to disable plugins of the "system" and "mobile" groups. The plugins of the first group are loaded by Joomla! before Mobile Joomla! starts to work (and there is no way to "unload" them), and the latter ones are used to detect mobile devices by Mobile Joomla! itself.

Auto Health Checkup a.k.a. "Please-don't-do-it-that-way"

This feature was a part of Mobile Joomla! Pro starting from its first release, but we found it so useful that we decided to add it to the Mobile Joomla! as well, so that everyone can benefit. The feature includes testing of most common setup mistakes done by users, like assigning a mobile template to a menu item, having menu items with identical aliases (possible in Joomla! 1.5), forcing mobile mode in cookies, etc. We believe this will safe a lot of our newer users from frustrating errors, and make sure even experienced ones don't make accidental mistakes. 

Updated Mobile Device Database

In Mobile Joomla! 1.1 we introduced a new database, Advanced Mobile Device Database (AMDD). It is targeted towards those users who want to make sure they only have GPLv2-compatible files installed on their server. (The other device database plugin we offer during installation is TeraWURLF provided by Scientia Mobile under AGPL license.)

The AMDD update includes an improved detection code for faster detections, and an updated device list. As a result the database contains now more than 13,500 browsers, while keeping the database size in less than 3 Mb.

Mobile Joomla! Pro 1.2

Mobile Joomla! Pro 1.2 contains all changes in Mobile Joomla 1.2 and some other fixes that our Pro subscribers can find on the Release Notes page.

Elegance Mobile Joomla! Template 1.2

Elegance Mobile Joomla! Template has been updated to use the latest jQueryMobile 1.2, which works faster and is more stable than jQueryMobile 1.1. It also contains some additional features, one of which is "popup" elements. That now works with Elegance template as well, see below:

A mobile site front page view with a Menu button

Popup element after tapping the Menu button

To transform your module into such an element, just set it to use the "popup" style (read more in Elegance documentation).

Full list of Elegance fixes/changes can be found on Release Notes page.

Other Mobile Joomla! Extensions

Following extensions have been updated, together with 1.2 release: Google Analytics Mobile, Adsense Mobile, Youtube Mobile, Mobile Content, and Remove Support Ads .