optimizing of OsCommerce

[Guest]

are there any contribuitions out there where there is button somewhere that can be clicked to optimize the page for viewing on a PDA or other handheld device?

 

thanks

 

Matt

[vasttech]

not sure what you mean by "button somewhere". If you mean putting a button on the page so that the user can click the button if they are using a pda and have the screen resized and adjusted to fit a pda then the answer is no there are no contributions that have this that I am aware of. If you mean a button somewhere in the admin side that you can push and it will rewrite the site so that it will size correctly for pdas, then the answer again is no.

 

Since every pda is different in screen-size you can use use a piece of javascript to detect the browser and adjust the images and everything accordingly when the page loads? If you are looking to create an m-Commerce site that strictly runs on mobile phones then you will need to customize osC slightly. With mobile you need to ensure your pages load quickly and images are optimized so as to not run up a subscribers data plan :)... The other thing you need to remember is that some PDAs don't have the capability to do javascript. So you will need to account for this as well.

 

When you move into the mobile realm you deal with a whole new beast. Trust me, that is all we work on everyday is designing and developing m-Commerce solutions for customers. All of our portals detect the headers sent by the PDA or phone which include the screen dimensions of that particular phone and the server sends the appropriate page based on that. We don't use javascript to detect at the phone level. You can also detect the phone make and model from the headers. If you really want to get crazy you can get the carrier as well (you have to grab their IP and run a lookup), and you could essentially have a different page displayed based on carrier (and yes there are companies out there that do it).