At my company we have an internet-facing SharePoint 2010 site. We will be creating a subsite that will serve as a mobile site (different design, smaller subset of information). When a user hits our homepage from a mobile device, I would like them to be redirected to a page where they can select a link to either view the mobile site, or the full desktop site.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe standard SharePoint mobile detection needs to be enabled for this. I think I can redirect the mobile users to my "choice" page pretty easily with an HttpModule, so that they don't hit the default SP mobile page. But the problem I'm having is that if they choose to go to the full desktop site, if I try to redirect them there in the module, they're just going back to the default SP mobile page.
My question is, is it possible to achieve this in SharePoint? It seems to me that the default mobile detection would be difficult to override the way I want it to happen. Do mobile users only have access to the mobile subsite in this scenario? If anyone needs more information from me, just let me know, I'll provide whatever I can.
(Also, I know it would be better to do a responsive layout, but that decision is out of my hands)
We created an "ismobile" cookie for the session after the redirect. This allows us to ignore the redirect if the user has this cookie. In means that they have already been redirected once this session so don't do it again if they hit the desktop page.
We started using this so that the "Show full website" link didn't just bounce the user back to the mobile page
Related
As you all know, mobile users can't access the page tab apps. I've googled around and found some methods to enhance the mobile user experience. But no method to keep the fan-gating feature working (besides third-parties like Shortstack). The best solution now seems to send the user to a page and on the page either send them to the FB page tab (desktop/tablet users) or a mobile friendly external page (mobile users). However, external page don't allow you to fan-gate. Is there no solution, or have I just not found it yet?
we have created a Facebook app, but when opening this on a mobile (via Web or iPhone) the page results in a 4oh4 error. I have setup a Mobile Web URL but still (after 1 hour wait) gives a 404.
Do I need to make specific changes on my app?
Please help.
This is expected as #Igy stated. You will need to have a handler to support redirecting mobile users to your apps.facebook.com/ or you can redirect them out of Facebook to your own URL if you are going to try and link to your page directly with an app embedded as a tab.
i.e. point link to http://yoursite.com/redirector
is mobile goes to http://yoursite.com/myapp or http://apps.facebook.com/
non mobile goes to http://facebook.com//app_
Some things to note:
You won't get any page specific data back from facebook on your page (i.e. Liked or Not Liked).
Based on #1 you won't be able to restrict the non-liking app users from a page.
After trying everything under the sun to get Facebook to redirect to a mobile web URL, here is what I needed to do in order to get the redirection working:
Make sure the Facebook application is a canvas application. This gives you the ability to give the application a namespace.
Give your application a namespace so that you can access it through https://apps.facebook.com/NAMESPACE. From here, Facebook will do the detection for you, and if needed, redirect your users to your specified mobile URL.
Make sure your app is NOT in sandbox mode.
If your app is in Sandbox Mode, Facebook won't redirect you to the mobile version you have specified in your app settings.
Facebook does the redirecting for you, you don't have to. Although their version of what "mobile" is and what you deem "mobile" might be different.
I currently have a custom app on Facebook that works fine on desktop PC's (full version of Facebook). As you would know you can't access custom apps from mobile devices and it redirects you to the wall of the page.
Is there a way to redirect them to a mobile web app if they try to access the app from a mobile device? So that way when people share links to the app I can at least show them something.
I saw the Mobile Web URL option in my app but am unsure on how this will actually work.
You are referring to the "mobile tab access" Vitrue announced this week? :)
What they are doing is this (basically):
Create a special link to the tab (mydomain.com/tablink1 or something, NOT the ?sk=app_xxxx URL in the browser bar)
On that link they have code which does a conditional redirect
If it's a regular browser/device, redirect to the tab (?sk=app_xxxx)
If it's a mobile browser/device, redirect to an alternate mobile webpage with the same content as the tab (mydomain.com/mobilecontent1)
The redirect is not on the actual tab, since the mobile browsers will never get there. It has to be on a separate page.
So if they try to access the tab on a mobile device with the regular tab URL they will not get redirected. It only works if they go to the special redirect URL. Vitrue's application publishes that special redirect URL to the Page wall.
It works very well to make sure everything you post to your Wall (which mobile users can see) does not break, but it does not really provide a redirect for mobile users trying to get to your tab.
That's the best we can do right now though, until Facebook actually comes up with a mobile tab solution (bug filed here: https://developers.facebook.com/bugs/264010470314544)
Good luck!
Does anyone know of a way to disable the mobile browser detection and redirect feature of Facebook via querystring parameters?
For example, if I go to www.facebook.com/CraigslistGenie in a mobile browser, I get redirected to http://m.facebook.com/CraigslistGenie. I would like the user to stay on the www version of the page.
you either change the user-agent to achieve that or you add ?m2w to the link i.e. http://www.facebook.com/CraigslistGenie/?m2w does NOT redirect (tested on Android) while http://www.facebook.com/CraigslistGenie does redirect to http://m.facebook.com/CraigslistGenie
For reference see here and here.
The first answer is correct, however if you want it to work on an Android phone (and keep working when you click on links within the site) you need to go into the browser settings (after you've gone to the http://facebook.com?m2w) and check the "Desktop version" setting.
This will prevent the browser from constantly trying to send you to either the mobile version of the site or the FB app.
Method given by Yahia is good. Adding ?m2w to link means converting mobile to web view.
Or,
Change settings of mobile browser i.e. User Agent. Both Steel and Dolphin browsers allow you to change that setting however. Both are free in the market. (I am not doing any marketing of browsers.)
Some of you may have noticed that, despite changing the User-Agent in the browser, you are still sent to a mobile website anyway. Check this patches given.
Check this huge discussion about tricks used for hiding mobile browser.
I'm building a mobile version of my site for smart-phones
(iPhone/Blackberry/Android/WebOS)
and I want to redirect to the mobile version from my main site whenever the user agent is of one of the kinds listed above (my mobile site is on a different url than my Desktop site).
My mobile version is more like a WebApp and does not contain the same content as the Desktop site.
After reading This Post by Google I understand that the Googlebot expects smartphones to display the Desktop version of the site (Googlebot-Mobile is not used for smartphones)
I'm afraid that if I redirect to the mobile version for smartphones, Google will give me penalty for cloaking, How can I avoid this?
I know that including a link from the main site to the mobile version and vice versa helps a lot.
Any other advice/best practices on how to be google friendly when creating mobile versions of the site for smartphones?
From the article:
For Googlebot and Googlebot-Mobile, it does not matter what the URL structure is as long as it returns exactly what a user sees too.
The key thing is you must be consistent in the content you give to the bot and the one you serve to the user.
Another interesting excerpt from the article:
For now, we expect smartphones to handle desktop experience content so there is no real need for mobile-specific effort from webmasters. However, for many websites it may still make sense for the content to be formatted differently for smartphones, and the decision to do so should be based on how you can best serve your users.
You can also serve a different page/content/styling based on the UA string, as stated in the article:
If you serve all types of content from www.example.com, i.e. serving desktop-optimized content or mobile-optimized content from the same URL depending on the User-agent, this will also lead to correct crawling by Googlebot and Googlebot-Mobile. This is not considered cloaking by Google.
I think it all boils down how different the content/styling is. If it's only slightly different, I would probably go with the same url serving both. If it's dramatically different, I would use a different url for smartphones.
Hope this helps!
Updating this with current information. Google now crawls with a smartphone Googlebot-Mobile user agent. See: Google blog post
Google's SEO PDF explains how to avoid cloaking penalties. Specifically, see Page 27. See: SEO PDF
The gist is, the content you serve a desktop user can be different from the content you serve a mobile user, as long as Googlebot is always served the same content you serve to any desktop user, and Googlebot-Mobile is always served the same content you serve to any mobile user. To abide by this, it seems to me you should not configure your site to serve mobile content based on finding "Googlebot-Mobile" in the user agent. The bot will supply a typical smartphone user agent string as part of it's own user agent--that's the part to rely on, or else if a new device comes out that you do not yet account for, you'll serve desktop content to it, but mobile content to Googlebot-Mobile impersonating that device.
You could use subdomain for your mobile site and redirect google mobile bot there together with smartphones