You may have thought on first glance at the title that this article is about building a mobile website.

It isn't.  This article explores a slightly different angle on the topic:  Building a website using a mobile phone as your tool.

This could be useful as a form of rapid prototyping. I tried this because I wanted to see what a website looked like, at a time when I happened to be thinking about it with no desktop/laptop internet connection.

Please note, the site I wanted to build was very simple, so didn’t require custom coding. I’m not talking about a WhiteHouse.gov in this article!

TL; DR: The results of my experience was that it is very possible to create an entire Drupal website on a mobile phone. However, the user experience was poor in a number of places.

Domain & DNS:

I used an existing domain name for this website, but created a new subdomain to test on. This saved the need to purchase a domain on my phone, although I suspect that wouldn’t have been a problem.

However, I did need to add the DNS “A” record for this subdomain.

My host (DomainMonster.com) does not have a specific mobile oriented website, or an Android App, but the full website worked just fine. I did already know my way around the website very well, which probably helped.

Provisioning the site:

My server is powered by Aegir, which makes creating a new website easy. I use the default Aegir theme, which again, is not mobile oriented, but the standard site works well for most tasks.

The only time I struggled here, was when a popup appeared – off the screen of my mobile. I couldn’t see or click it, so had to find a different route to perform the same task.

Downloading modules:

Like most of the Drupal community, I use Drush on my server to make tasks like downloading modules quick and simple.  I had also previously set up ConnectBot on my Android phone, which enabled me to get shell access to my server (aside: Worth doing so that you can reboot if an urgent issue occurs).

This made downloading modules trivial.

Configuration:

Lastly, I tried to set the website up as I wanted it. This was almost all possible (all except uploading some screenshots that I wanted to do on a desktop anyway). However, this was much more hassle than I realised.

Often, navigating around the admin area of the site would take several clicks, where I’m used to quickly finding the page I need with Administration Menu.

When creating blocks, it helped me when I remembered to click the “Show Row Weights” option. This gives the possibility to reorder using dropdown selection boxes rather than drag’n’drop.

Due to wanting to upload screenshots, and the general hassle of writing content on my mobile phone, I decided in the end to leave the final configuration until later when I could work on my laptop.

In Conclusion:

As you can tell from my experiences above, it is definitely possible to create an entire website using your mobile phone (and if necessary, I could have used my time and patience to finish the website completely on my phone). However, the experience is clunky, to say the least.

I believe that Drupal 8 and Spark both offer improvements against my experience (on default Drupal 7). I plan to try these too, and if so, will write my experiences up there as well.

Have you tried creating Drupal websites on your mobile too?

Any tips and tricks that I missed?

Category: WebsitesTags: mobilesite-buildingDrupalDrupal 7SparkDrupal Planet