I was reading up on HowToProvideAlternateViewsForMobileDevices on the Rails wiki this morning and couldn’t help but notice how much easier it is to set up a mobile version of a Django site. At World Online we have stripped-down barebones no frills “all we want are the facts ma’am” versions of all of our sites. They prove extremely useful during KU basketball games or when you’re in downtown lawrence and want to know what restaurants are open. Since our mobile sites are just alternate templates on the same views, setup goes something like this:
In main_site.settings:
TEMPLATE_DIRS = (
'/path/to/templates/mainsite.com/',
'/path/to/templates/default/',
)In mobile_site.settings:
from main_site.settings import *
TEMPLATE_DIRS = (
'/path/to/templates/mobile.mainsite.com/',
'/path/to/templates/default/'
) The first line imports all of the settings from your main site. We then overwrite the TEMPLATE_DIRS setting to point to the mobile version of our templates (and fall back to default templates if there isn’t a mobile specific version). Because every app that we write also gets a default template we can have a complete mobile site up and running by creating just one or two mobile base templates.
While Django can’t help you debate internally the “one web” versus “two webs” philosophies, it can definitely help you produce lightweight mobile-friendly content with minimum effort.