Right, I've started work on a template and theme suitable for Safari Mobile.

Anyone got any thoughts/ideas/comments?

I'm basically just hoping to make it "streamlined" with just the core features. My thoughts are that a mobile template doesn't need to have all the same features of the main template. I'm hoping not to include an iPhone/iPod compatible User/Moderator control panel, for example.

Also, because the font and image sizes are going to be increased, cutting out some other features will save on space to avoid loads of scrolling. Things that (I assume) people don't use much on their phones (if at all). Like the "View new posts", and "View my posts" links. Stuff like that.

So if there is something that you could not live without when you are browsing the forum from your iPod/iPhone then post it here. Please do post any thing else you want to say!

This all sounds rather good. One thing I don’t like about forums like this is the way they are handled by mobile devices like the iPhone, so this is excellent news.

I would imagine that the rather large slab of similes won’t be needed. The interface for the iPhone is fairly simple, so I would guess submit/quote/preview/save buttons to be easily tapped, and as little space put over to decoration and tranquilments as possible. Don’t forget that the soft keyboard will cover a good chunk of the screen when typing replies.

If possible you could exclude avatar and sig. images to save both space and load times. Maybe exclude images in posts too, just display the URL, though I can imaging that may be more difficult.

+1 for the removing avatars and sigs. That's save a lot of space and I could certainly live without them.

Yes - that would be a fairly good thing to do. Some of the avatars here seem to be huge, and those folk on the move would prefer a fast loading site.

Okay, no avatars then.

Will look into the images in posts as links thing, but I suspect it won't be possible without digging deep into the guts of phpBB itself. You never know though, I'll be digging anyway to get it to change the template automatically for Safari on mobile devices, so it might happen.

Made quite good progress today. I'm working from the ProSilver theme, and it's certainly taking shape. A few little tweaks and then hacking the PHP to get it to change the template automatically, then folk will be free to take a look and make recommendations.

You may be able to suppress the images using CSS. Here is a sample of a post with images in it.



You may be able to do something like:



to hide them.

Yeah but if the image is pretty crucial, then people are going to miss out. I'd rather turn any images into links, personally.

Woops just saw this thread and remembered about this little project!



I've got one template 80-90% done (think it's the subsilver one, basically not the blue one, the silver one), just needs a few tweaks then testing. That'll have to wait though, most likely til Tuesday as there is a load of family stuff going on Fri-Mon because we have all booked time off to do something which should be cool.

Anyway, I'll post back when I've got something more to show.