Panels variants can easily be used to create a mobile version of your website. If you’re already using Panels, you need one module: Mobile Tools (http://drupal.org/project/mobile_tools). It contains a plug-in for Panels, making it easy to create a specific variant for mobile.
First, create your normal page layout using Panels. Then, create a second variant and when you add content (or in the content settings), choose "Mobile" for your build mode.
It’s as easy as that!
Other articles from this issue:
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Larry Garfield
Clicking together a Drupal site is easy. Building a streamlined, powerful Drupal site takes a bit more work. Understanding how Drupal approaches content is important to architecting a site properly. Fortunately, the Drupal stack is fairly straightforward.
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Get a jump-start on writing Drupal 7 modules in PHP. Use this tutorial to create a fully functional module leveraging common APIs in Drupal's framework.
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Michael J. Ross
This article is a review of James Pearce's new book, "Professional Mobile Web Development with WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal", published by Wrox. Even though the book is CMS-neutral among those three leading CMSs, my article looks at it from the perspective of Drupal. I provide a synopsis and overview of the book as a whole, and also focus on the two Drupal-specific chapters, to give the reader a sense of the suitability of the technical information and recommendations as resources for Drupal developers and themers who wish to create mobile-ready websites.
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Comments
I think building a mobile site this way is a really bad approach I believe better results can be achieved by designing mobile first using media queries and CSS this way your site can scale from large screen devices to mobile with very little overhead.
Panels adds a lot of unnecessary overhead on the server PHP and MySQL resources wise.
You would get a better mobile site by using a theme like Omega which already provides you with the necessary media queries to adapt to different screen sizes.
I would also probably use the context module which should be lighter on resources panels. Mobile Tools can also be used the context module.
I firmly believe that site layout should stay in theme engine and people should not rely on contributed modules like panels for creating layout.
Otherwise I think mobile tools is an awesome module.