Codeigniter application for mobile and desktop

Question

I have a codeigniter application for desktop can it be converted to a mobile app when accessed from a mobile using the same code?

Answer 1

You have two options, create a responsive design or create one desktop design and a mobile design based on the user agent.

If your design is easy to adapt for both worlds (desktop and mobile) with a little tweaking and a responsive design should be enough to do the trick. But before you choose this way remember that you have plenty of mobile devices with many screen resolutions.

I advise you to read this slideshow about the mobile web: http://www.slideshare.net/bryanrieger/rethinking-the-mobile-web-by-yiibu

And just for information the types of mobile devices we have on the market. http://jquerymobile.com/gbs/

To help you out with responsive design you can use some of the frameworks available on the internet:

Twitter bootstrap : http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/index.html

Foundation 3: http://foundation.zurb.com/

Skeleton: http://www.getskeleton.com/

YAML 4: http://www.yaml.de/

You can see more frameworks here http://www.awwwards.com/what-are-frameworks-22-best-responsive-css-frameworks-for-web-design.html

In case your desktop layout doesn't fit as a proper mobile layout you can rely on the user agent, although he is not 100% accurate, and build two different layouts. On the desktop side you can use some of the responsive frameworks mentioned before, for the mobile side you can use:

jQuery Mobile: http://jquerymobile.com/

iUI: http://www.iui-js.org/

UI ON TARGET: http://www.rikulo.org/

The best is a mix of the two worlds, a responsive design for small and large screens for users on a desktop and a proper design for mobile users.

Answer 2

the different between two is in the template or view part of application . basically you have to identify visitor device and if it is a mobile show him the mobile view that you have prepared .

you can create great responsive mobile template using jquery mobile .

Answer 3

Yes, I've done exactly this in the past.

What I did is I used the user agent class to detect whether the user agent was a desktop or mobile client, and used that to set a flag in the sessions. Based on that, I served different views depending on the value of that flag. This approach has the advantage that the URLs remain the same regardless of which interface you're using.

I would recommend adding a way to manually override this, though, since detecting the user agent is never going to be 100% accurate.