Mobile platform and upgrading

[MOTOCARE]

Ok, at the minute www.motocare.co.uk we are running joomla 1.5.9 with vurtuemart 1.1.3 and get a lot of traffic now on mobile devices. ive looked at a couple of plugins but some will only run on vuirtuemart 2.0, but virtuemart 2 will only run on joomla 1.6 and above. if i get our site developers to upgrade joomla and virtuemart to the latest releases will i need any other plugins or will virtuemart 2 be fully mobile compatible as i done want to have the cost of them upgrading only to find that i will need this other plugin for this all to work or will the new virtuemart cover all this for me..??
I'm only doing this i have recently checked all our stats for the site and noticed a big increase in mobile operating system usage.
many thanks for any help given..

[chetanmadaan]

I check your website on my iphone and i don't see a special layout for mobile devices... at-least not for iOS.

When you upgrade, you would need the developer to upgrade the database (articles, vm orders and everything that's saved in mysql) and files (Design and all core Joomla/virtuemart files).

so it's really that your design should also be upgraded in order to get things done right.

[jenkinhill]

@motocare there are now plenty of responsive Joomla 2.5 templates, which are mobile complaint. VirtueMart 2 already works pretty well on these and can be improved with the use of template overrides.

In any case upgrading is recommended. Not only are the Joomla/VM versions you are using no longer supported, but they have known security issues.  http://forum.virtuemart.net/index.php?topic=106865.0

[maryswave]

You don't really need to do a full upgrade if you don't want to as that is quite a bit of work.  You can zip up your current template and rename these files.

Folder:  template_mobile
inside templatedetails.xml rename here:  <name>template_mobile</name>
inside templatedetails.xml reference a different language file:  <language tag="en-GB">en-GB/en-GB.tpl_template_mobile.ini</language>

then go to cpanel, find your language file and copy it with this new name, zip up the template and install it.  then create a mobile menu for your mobile template.
go to template manager and assigned the new mobile menu to this mobile template. 

There are different template specific mobile plugins available but this plugin does so much more.
http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/style-a-design/templating/11173

The next step is to add items to your mobile menu and modify your template to fit the mobile screen. You can use an accordion menu or just a simple list menu.  You may also want to create a new virtuemart layout that runs only on the mobile template so that the pictures are on top of the description so that it is not too wide for the mobile screen.



   

[MOTOCARE]

Thanks very much for all your replies, its a great help. i think i have a bit of deciding to do now.
An upgrade would be better then at least the site is secure and i have the latest version, but then again the cost is an issue at this time also.
Hmm..
Thanks again guy's i'll keep you posted....!!!!

[MOTOCARE]

one thing i forgot to mention is we have spent a bit on SEO in the last few months and they have said that..

"To ensure that you do not lose a SEO authority the URL structure and Tile Tags must stay the same as they are now.  "

Will this still be ok if we just upgrade joomla and virtuemart and keep the same template..??

[MOTOCARE]

any takers on this...!!

[jenkinhill]

The Joomla & VM template structure will be different, and Joomla 2.5's inbuilt SEF system is very good. But see this component for SEO when updating - http://forum.virtuemart.net/index.php?topic=97293.0

[MOTOCARE]

So is there any way to create a mobile template easily with these versions that i am running.
Thanks

[jenkinhill]

No. Those of versions date from the time when extra sites were built for mobiles often using the WAP protocol, although a lot of sites now use an additionally designed and hosted HTML based mobile site (often linked to a .mobi domain). This has OK for sites that do not need regular updates, as both sites need to be updated together and there could be SEO issues with duplicated content.

It is only in the last 12-18 months with newer generation smartphones and tablets that there has been serious work done to make Joomla templates that are fully responsive, and there are now many available for J2.5 and of course for J3, which was developed to be mobile platform friendly from the start by using Twitter Bootstrap.

There is an addon for existing Joomla sites to allow them to re-size and re-display for mobiles, but I don't know if that works for anything earlier than J2.5 - see http://www.mobilejoomla.com

[MOTOCARE]

Thanks for the reply, i have checked out mobile joomla and it does look like it will run Joomla 1.5.9 and there is also a plugin http://www.daycounts.com/shop/virtuemart/virtuemart-theme-for-mobile-detail
that will allow virtuemart to work but only with 1.1.9, so i have asked my site developers for a price on just upgrading v1.1.3 to 1.1.9 as i believe there is a patch update for this...!!

[jenkinhill]

Don't forget to update Joomla, too. You will have to go to J1.5.26 to avoid the known security issues with older versions. They are still unsupported versions, though.

[MOTOCARE]

I asked the developer a few weeks ago about upgrading joomla but they said we have a lot of bespoke css on our site and all that would have to be redone and it would be a few thousand to upgrade. and as we have some ongoing SEO (done by someone else) work being done we didn't want to lose any of this. Does this sound plausible..??
Thanks

[jenkinhill]

I can see that it would cost quite a lot of time to upgrade the site template for Joomla2.5 and VM2 - but not a few thousands!

And to update Joomla from 1.5.9 to 1.5.26 would not affect any css - that is part of the template you use, not part of Joomla.

As for updating VirtueMart, I would probably just go up to 1.1.8 and that fixes the security problems and avoids a couple of bugs that appeared in 1.1.9 and were never fixed - although there are solutions in the old forum. Again no css needs changing.

While you are at it get the developer to remove the "Joomla SEO powered by JoomSEF" link on every page - it is a 5 minute job and looks unprofessional.

Just updating the Joomla/VM versions should not change the urls as long as JoomSEF is compatible with the later versions (which it was, as others used it). So you could still be number 1 on Google for "Fuzzy Dice Various Colours" - although if I search for "Fuzzy Dice" or "Fuzzy Dice for cars" your site is nowhere to be seen.

[MOTOCARE]

Thanks for the quick chat Kelvyn..