Mobile Template for Sphider.


This is a template for use with Sphider Search by Ando Saabas (ando(a t)cs.ioc.ee). The goal of this template is to provide search and results forms that will work on all mobile phone browsers so that Sphider can be used as a mobile site search.

Features:

    * Pages generated with this template will be valid xhtml-mp, xhtml 1.0 strict, or wml. Accept headers are checked to deliver a mime type and markup the user agent accepts (application/vnd.wap.xhtml+xml, application/xhtml+xml, text/html or text/vnd.wap.wml)

    * Page sizes are small, under 5KB for (x)html and under 1397 bytes (compiled) for wml provided that the default length of search result summaries is changed to 50 as descried in the installation instructions.

    * Mobile friendly user interface that puts results at the top of the page and provides numeric accelerator keys (accesskeys) on devices known to accept them.

    * Self-contained. All code is in templates/mobile/ no changes to Ando's distributed files. Simple installation - just unzip mobile.zip into Sphider's Templates folder. See the readme for recommended Sphider configuration changes.

Limitations:

    * Sphider Categories are not supported by this template.

Requirements:

    * Sphider search engine from http://www.cs.ioc.ee/~ando/sphider/. Sphider requires PHP 4.n and MySQL 4.n This version of the template has been tested with 1.3.1c.

Installation:

	* After installing Sphider, extract mobile.zip into Spider's
	templates folder.

	* Using the "Settings" tab in the Spider's Administration console, 
	(admin/admin.php) set the "search template" to "mobile"

	* By default wml-only devices are deliver a wml search form and results pages.
	This only makes sense if the site being searched actually supports wml. You
	want to disable wml, uncomment line 116 in mobile.php shown below

	#$this->bHtml = TRUE;

	by removing the '#' character.  This will cause wml devices to throw an
	"Invalid Content" error which is preferable to letting users search and then
	getting this error when they try to open a result link.

	* Also on the Settings tab change the "Maximum length of page summary displayed
	in search results" from the default of 250  to 50.  This will keep page sizes 
	below the 1397 bytes compiled that is all wml devices are guaranteed to accept.
	If you don't wish to support wml-only devices you can increase this setting but
	I wouldn't go over 80 for good mobile usability.

To see examples of this template in action visit my sites with any mobile or PC 
browser:

http://yeswap.com
http://wapreview.mobi


Dennis
editor (a t) wapreview.com
11/19/2006