In this article, I’m going to cover a few different options for when it comes to making an iPhone-friendly version of your site. There are four options that I am going to evaluate here. I’ve implemented all four, and each is suitable for its own type of project.
Joomla. A fantastic CMS system, where do we start with this? The free template out there is really fantastic, great job done. Joomla 1.5 ups the ante with the quality of the templates available, and now it’s really an interesting platform to develop on. The limitations are mainly with the structure of the content, and I’m not sure how well it works with installed components/modules, but at a glance, it’s impressive. this is the easiest out-of-the-box solution available as far as I know, except maybe using .
Plig. Another great open source php based website tool. This time it is based on the reviews. The templates I’ve seen so far have been immature in my opinion. I have seen some good implementations of custom sites, but at this time there is no generic template available with which to apply a look to your site, and there is no built-in user-agent based template change. This is all on the way and available on the pligg forums.
custom static. This is where it generates all the html once and then uploads it to the site. You would load a database with the content, prototype your iPhone template, and then write codesmith templates to generate the files. A good example would be a hotel booking website, which only contains static content about hotels. The tool you would use to generate these files would be Codesmith. The advantage of this is speed of page loading and ease of hosting – basically any hosting will work, no php/asp.net/etc runtime requirements. No database. Nothing. Everything is very efficient and the server can run at optimum speed. Of course, the downside is that there’s no search functionality, no ordering, nothing beyond javascript.
Custom dynamics. This is where you write a custom site using php or asp.net that will generate the iPhone html on the fly, just like any normal dynamic website. To be SEO friendly, we would like to rewrite the URL. Of course, we also need a database and scripting engine, like .net and php, along with all the code to render it. Its advantages are the inverse of the custom static solution. The key question to ask yourself is how much dynamic content do you need? This is the most flexible solution, but the development time and hosting overhead make it less attractive. It is quite possible to combine the custom static solution with a custom search page, thereby reducing development time and getting all the benefits of the static solution. This is something I will be implementing on my new iPhone hotel booking site.
Regarding iPhone templates, the two templates I looked at were 1) the free one, 2) the knoxtemplate – $9. I must say that knoxtemplate was worth it for me. If it saves me 30 minutes then it’s easily worth it. It has saved me much more time than that. Good luck with the development of your iPhone and write me if you need any advice.
