Mobile Web Toolkit by Saverio Castellano @ Beeweeb, http://www.beeweb.com MWT, the Mobile Web toolkit by Beeweeb, is an Open-Source PHP framework which enables the creation of mobile sites easily. MWT deals with the issues that so far have limited the spreading of the Mobile Web: high number of device models in the market with different characteristics (screen size, browser implementation, different markups etc). To create a mobile site, you need to understand MWT's main components. The adaptation engine rescales images and resizes the content to fit device characteristics. An MWT plug-in is necessary to retrieve the content from the backend and pass it to the adaptation engine. As of today (May 2007), MWT ships with the Wordpress plug-in, which enables immediate 'mobilisation' of an existing Wordpress-based blog. Plug-ins for popular CMSs (Contente Management Systems) is planned for summer. MWT generates XHTML-MP Pages through 'widgets', i.e. blocks of MWT specific mark-up handling specific types of content. Widgets are written in XHTML-MP and taglibs (not the original JSPs taglibs, though, yet something close enough. Beeweeb actively maintains a PHP5 port of JSP taglibs which is used in MWT). MWT's taglibs engine preserve the XML structure of pages and enables "multiserving": Similarly to WALL, widget tags are device-aware. They are expanded by the taglib engine to generate device-specific XHTML-MP code at request-time (give or take the usual caching). The same taglib engine enables dynamic style sheet generation: by means of a easy expression-language CSS templates can be scripted to define device-aware styles. Of course, MWT will also take care of resizing your site graphic in multiple ways depending on device capabilities. As of today, MWT supports over 600 device models. It goes without saying that this information comes directly from WURFL. One of MWT's outstanding features is the editorial tool that makes it possible to create, edit and configure mobile pages, widgets, themes and styles. All of this is done through a powerful WYSIWYG Ajax-based user interface (see figure below). Finally, the integration layer enables MWT to talk to existing content repositories (typically a CMS, but it could be any API). More CMS plug-ins will be released over the next few months. The screenshots below show a web site (on the left) and its mobile counterpart: A screenshot from the editorial tool Download & Installation The Wordpress plugin version of Mobile Web Toolkit is available for download at: http://www.beeweeb.com/mwt/index.php/products/mobile-web-toolkit/mwt-download/ To install the plugin, just follow these simple steps: Unzip the content of the plugin to a folder called mwt Copy the plugin content to your Wordpress directory: Assuming that the path to Wordpress root directory is pathToWordpress/ copy all files in mwt/wp-admin/ to pathToWordpress/wp-admin/, then copy the directory mwt/wp-content/plugins/mwt to pathToWordpress/wp-content/plugins/ Have a look at the configuration file pathToWordpress/wp-content/plugins/mwt/config.php, and change settings to reflect your desired setup. Open the URL of your Wordpress blog in a browser and go to "Site Admin", then login with administrator privileges. Make sure that "Permalinks" are enabled in your blog. MWT depends crucially on this feature because of its URL rewriting engine. If you don't enable permalinks you won't be able to access the mobile version of your blog! If "Permalinks" aren't enabled choose "Options->Permalinks" from the administration menu, then in the permalinks page under "Common Options" choose any option that is not the default one and then click on "Update Permalink Structure" From Wordpress administration menu choose "Plugins" and activate "Mobile Web Toolkit". You are now ready to use MWT. To start, you can choose "Mobile" from the administration panel. If something goes wrong take a look at the log, by default the log file is created in the directory: mwt/wp-content/plugins/mwt/data/mwt.log Online Demo An online demo of MWT as a Wordpress plugin is available at: http://m.beeweeb.com (compare to main BeeWeeb website, which is built on top of the same publishing system) How to contribute So far MWT has been released as a Wordpress plugin. When installed MWT provides the mobile version of a Wordpress Blog. To improve the plugin you can contribute in the following ways: Report bugs and post suggestions in MWT's forum, at: http://www.beeweeb.com/phpbb/ Write new Wordpress widgets for MWT. The plugin comes with a basic set of widgets providing access to the main Wordpress functionalities. This set is far from completion and can therefore be extended and improved. You can extend the existing Widgets by providing new features and configuration options or write new Widgets to add unsupported functionalities Write new themes and styles By June 2007, a new version of MWT will be released by the Beeweeb development team. The newer version will feature a plugin/adapter mechanism that will enable users to integrate it into any CMS. Creating a plugin for your favorite CMS or helping the MWT development team to create such an adapter is likely to be a welcome contribution.