Contec folks Axel and Roland are at Bryght today for the January 2007 Vancouver League of Drupalers to present on their use of Drupal and Drupal with Mobile. Here are rough "live" notes:

  • TSX:BUZ is their symbol!
  • main market is China, head office is Port Coquitlam (20ish ), 10 in Beijing
  • framework for hosting mobile applications
  • used to use PostNuke
  • moved to Drupal
  • need bilingual Chinese, i18n, zh-hans
  • used tinymce for marketing
  • filerbrowser - Boris suggests taxonomy_explorer which is used for file downloads, can browse files by vocabulary
  • nice_menus
  • Big question: can we give our members access to their site using mobile phone?
  • How to mobilize Drupal page?
  • Main problem is that alot of mobile phones only support WML not HTML, small screens, image capability, etc.
  • So used rendering service (from Contec naturlich!)
  • Re-render based on device's UA profile
  • This works just fine with Drupal
  • Added some hints to an existing theme
  • Limitations: no Flash, no Javascript, no Active/X, no Java Applets
  • Do these limitations apply to Drupal?
  • What do we do about Javascript?
  • Drupal site should work without Javascript i.e. should degrade gracefully
  • There is a Drupal mobile theme with stripped HTML - i.e. http://drupal.org/project/mobile
  • Boris - Should be able to use this with a module
  • Steven - use hook_init() - inside hook use PHP include
  • ianiv - use WML theme?
  • Answer problem is with images, phone may support only certain types of images, may have hard limit of data, etc
  • Boris points to his E61 which has WebKit browser
  • Are there mobilization activities within Drupal?
  • mobile group at groups.drupal.org
  • SMS Gateway module - http://drupal.org/project/smsgateway
  • sjdkfljsd
  • WAP push - push binary SMS with URL in it, could use for blog subscription, also content download like a ringtone
  • How important is this to the Drupal community
  • Web service to deliver SMS and WAP push
  • interest in APIs
  • people would use free service even they had ads

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