Proposal: HTML5 Mobile Template for Apache Roller

Status	proposal under development
Issue	ROL-1919
Original Proposal	GSoC Proposal
Target Release	5.0+
Original Authors	Shelan Perera

Proposal Abstract:

Roller is a full-featured, multi-user and group-blog server suitable for blog sites large and small. It has features such as multi-user and group blogging, comment moderation, spam prevention, RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0 support. In nutshell roller is a blogging engine.

Mobile browsers are starting to eclipse desktop web browsing and, unfortunately, most Roller themes do not work well on small-format mobile devices. This project will address this shortcoming by modifying the Roller blog rendering system to support mobile-ready blog theme templates, and providing one example theme that uses these features in combination with HTML5 to show full-sized pages to desktop browser users and small format pages to mobile users.

Requirements

Identify and differentiate request from desktop user agent to mobile user agent.
Ability to specify user preference for mobile theme or full theme (Desktop) as default theme.
Render mobile theme if user preferred mobile theme and request comes from a mobile device.
Add one HTML5 mobile theme as a sample.

Issues

How to detect the possible matches for mobile devices in HTTP header user agent.
Efficient way to manage and maintain possible devices list for new mobile devices added in the future.
How to render the mobile theme.(Do we let the theme designers to implement their own mobile theme or one theme to act in both ways.)
Basic information that is to display in mobile template
Feature to be added to the HTML5 template.(Client side storage , media etc.)

Design

How mobile detection is done?

Roller mobile will use details in HTTP header's user-agent and match it with possible matches using regular expressions.

How to render the mobile theme?

There are 3 options available,

Use different weblog,search ,tags and entry pages for each template. complex to maintain and handle
Use a one default mobile theme for all desktop theme. restricted
Use different mobile theme for each desktop theme. preferred method