Extension:MobileFrontend
 Release status: stable |
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| Implementation | User interface, Hook |
| Description | Provides a mobile-friendly view |
| Author(s) | |
| Latest version | 2.4.1 |
| Compatibility policy | Snapshots releases along with MediaWiki. Master is not backward compatible. |
| MediaWiki | 1.33+[1] |
| PHP | 5.5.9+ |
| License | GNU General Public License 2.0 or later |
| Download | README |
| Example | m.mediawiki.org |
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| Quarterly downloads | 786 (Ranked 3rd) |
| Public wikis using | 9,025 (Ranked 14th) |
| Translate the MobileFrontend extension if it is available at translatewiki.net | |
| Issues | Open tasks · Report a bug |
The MobileFrontend extension helps improve the mobile presence of a MediaWiki instance.
| This extension is maintained by the Web team. |
Features include:
- creates a separate mobile site for your mobile traffic,
- system administrators are able to provide a different skin, e.g. Skin:Minerva Neue.
- provides various content transformations to make your content more friendly,
- notably section collapsing and content re-arrangement and removal, including putting the lead paragraph above the lead photo or info box, even if the lead paragraph is below them in the page's source code.
- simplifies mobile footer and adds a desktop/mobile site link,
- provides a beta mode with a feature management system for adding experimental features for anonymous users.
This page is designed for end users who want to install it on their development instance. If you are keen to help us build it and improve it we encourage you to get involved.
Prerequisites
Before installing MobileFrontend, if you make heavy use of templates and/or inline styles (the style attribute) you should review your content to see whether it is mobile friendly. The TemplateStyles extension can be used to style content so that it renders nicely on mobile and desktop. MobileFrontend will not magically fix this for you!
In particular, you may want to review your landing page (main page). See Mobile homepage formatting.
Installation
- Download and move the extracted
MobileFrontendfolder to yourextensions/directory.
Developers and code contributors should install the extension from Git instead, using:cd extensions/
git clone https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/mediawiki/extensions/MobileFrontend - Add the following code at the bottom of your LocalSettings.php file:
wfLoadExtension( 'MobileFrontend' );
- If necessary configure at your convenience
Done – Navigate to Special:Version on your wiki to verify that the extension is successfully installed.
Vagrant installation:
- If using Vagrant, install with
vagrant roles enable mobilefrontend --provision
Setup Nearby
MobileFrontend provides the Special:Nearby page with a little configuration. To get this to work, a few optional steps are required:
- Due to browser security, you will need to be running a secure site over SSL — it is not possible to request a user's location over HTTP.
- Install the GeoData extension
- Run update.php
- In
LocalSettings.phpadd$wgMFNearby = true; - Determine article coordinates:
- Add location data to your articles by using the
coordinatesparser function, for example{{#coordinates:37.786971|-122.399677|primary}}. For syntax details, see the documentation for GeoData. - Alternatively, you can use a separate MediaWiki installation for Nearby by setting
$wgMFNearbyEndpointin yourLocalSettings.phpfile. For example,$wgMFNearbyEndpoint = 'https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/api.php';will use coordinates of English Wikipedia articles. The nearby endpoint will be used to find content related to a given location.
- Add location data to your articles by using the
Set up a skin
MobileFrontend provides you with a mobile formatted website to go alongside your existing desktop website. You can skin it however you want.
// Choose one of these pairs of lines and add chosen code to bottom of LocalSettings.php file:
wfLoadSkin( 'MinervaNeue' );
$wgDefaultMobileSkin = 'minerva'; // use Minerva skin (You need to download and install it separately in 1.37 and older, otherwise you'll get an exception)
wfLoadSkin( 'Vector' );
$wgDefaultMobileSkin = 'vector'; // use Vector skin
wfLoadSkin( 'Timeless' );
$wgDefaultMobileSkin = 'timeless'; // use Timeless skin
The following skins are compatible with MobileFrontend:
- Skin:Minerva Neue (stable, default on WMF wikis)
- Skin:Vector (default desktop skin, uses an experimental responsive mode for mobile)
- Skin:Timeless (experimental skin)
- Skin:MonoBook
- Skin:Citizen (responsive skin)
Configuration settings
See Extension:MobileFrontend/Configuration
All configuration options are detailed in the README.md file.
Additional tweaks
Get the most out of MobileFrontend by adding these optional compatible extensions:
- Extension:GeoData - Get Special:Nearby and geotag your articles.
- Extension:PageImages - Adds images to search and nearby results.
- Extension:VisualEditor - Add Visual editing to your mobile experience.
Local customisations
CSS styling
| MediaWiki version: | ≤ 1.40 |
To apply CSS to your mobile theme, edit MediaWiki:Mobile.css, the counterpart of MediaWiki:Common.css.
In order for the stylesheet to function you may have to add mw.loader.using('mobile.site.styles') to your MediaWiki:Mobile.js.
MobileFrontend does not load the global MediaWiki:Common.css, neither does it load any of the user stylesheets.
More information
If you would like to test the mobile extension on a desktop browser or your device doesn't render the mobile version, you can append the following key-value pair to the URL query string: ?useformat=mobile. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki?useformat=mobile
If you would like to view the mobile version of a page without enabling the extension across the entire site you can append the string to the URL on that page, too.
Legacy features of MobileFrontend
MobileFrontend has traditionally been a very large extension. Many features have either surpassed their requirements or will do at some future date. These are listed below.
API
APIs are provided by the MobileFrontend extension, but long term we expect to deprecate them in favour of Page Content Service. Use these APIs at your own risk. They may disappear (although we will give you sufficient notice when they do)!
MobileView API
| This feature was removed completely in version 1.39. |
See Extension:MobileFrontend/MobileViewAPI.
Extended action=parse
action=parse accepts extra parameters:
mobileformat=- Return rendered page HTML in a mobile format 1.23+.
mainpage- Apply mobile main page transformations.
Example:
| Result |
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{
"parse": {
"title": "Therion (band)",
"text": {
"*": "<div><table class=\"infobox vcard plainlist\" style=\"width:22em\"><tr><th colspan=\"2\" style=\"text-align:center;font-size:125%;font-weight:bold;background-color: #b0c4de\"><span class=\"fn org\">Therion</span></th>\n</tr><tr><td colspan=\"2\" style=\"text-align:center\"><a href=\"/wiki/File:2130860153_281d30b3bf_b.jpg\" class=\"image\">
...
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meta=siteinfo
The domain of the mobile version of the site (which might or might not be the same as the normal domain) is available under the mobileserver key of the general siteinfo information.
For developers/sysadmins
Setup
You may need to run npm install and install php composer to get the precommit hook to run, depending on what you're doing with the extension.
Testing with articles on a foreign wiki (live data)
Using the mobile view
WMF sites
On Wikimedia Foundation-run sites, we use Varnish caching servers to check the user agent of your device.
Non-WMF sites
For non-WMF sites, you can either set up your configuration to mimic how things are done at the WMF (doing device detection at the proxy layer and setting specific X-Device headers), or you can simply use "?useformat=mobile" to switch an article to use the mobile view. See Extension:MobileFrontend/Configuring browser auto-detection.
$wgMFMobileHeader = 'X-WAP'; or modify your cache (Varnish) header setting, as long as they match.Using Apache (.htaccess or httpd.conf)
To set up a mobile domain, add the following rule to .htaccess or http.config
<IfModule mod_headers.c>
<If "req('Host') =~ /^mobile./i">
RequestHeader set X-Subdomain "mobile"
</If>
</IfModule>
In your hosts file (assuming your desktop site is on localhost):
127.0.0.1 mobile.localhost
In LocalSettings.php:
wfLoadExtension('MobileFrontend');
$wgMFAutodetectMobileView = true;
$wgMobileUrlCallback = fn( $domain ) => "mobile.$domain";
Now if you navigate to mobile.localhost you should see the mobile site.
FAQ
The following questions frequently appear on our talk page. Please check this list before posting about them on the talk page or use the existing talk topic, if available, to receive clarifications.
Q: How do I customise the main menu of the Minerva skin?
A: This is tracked in phabricator but you can see Topic:Tiggc18fvd3stmsf has an interim solution.
Q: How do I add HTML to the Minerva skin, for example to add ads or additional script tags?
A: You can do this by editing the template file for the skin (currently include/skins/minerva.mustache). See this discussion for details.
Q: The extension I am using doesn't seem to work on MobileFrontend. Why?
A: It's likely the extension is old and needs to add compatibility to MobileFrontend. Please contact the developer of the extension and point them to ResourceLoader/Writing a MobileFrontend friendly ResourceLoader module. Please do not post to the talk page, as in this case it would be better to file a bug on Phabricator (you can login using your MediaWiki.org username) for a quicker response.
Q: I upgraded MobileFrontend and now I'm getting a fatal exception!
A: You are probably using incompatible versions of MobileFrontend and MediaWiki. In most cases, we can't help you here. Try upgrading MobileFrontend or MediaWiki to resolve your issue.
Q: After upgrading MediaWiki I'm getting an exception wgMFDefaultSkinClass is not setup correctly.
A: MobileFrontend currently assumes you have the Minerva Neue skin installed. If you don't you'll need to install this or configure your mobile skin per instructions above.
For Extension Developers
By default resource modules in extensions will not be loaded in mobile view.
Should a module need to be loaded while in mobile view this guide on writing MobileFrontend friendly modules will be of help.
See also
References
- ↑ :Fatal error: Uncaught ExtensionDependencyError: MobileFrontend is not compatible with the current MediaWiki core (version 1.32.2), it requires: >= 1.33.0.
| This extension is being used on one or more Wikimedia projects. This probably means that the extension is stable and works well enough to be used by such high-traffic websites. Look for this extension's name in Wikimedia's CommonSettings.php and InitialiseSettings.php configuration files to see where it's installed. A full list of the extensions installed on a particular wiki can be seen on the wiki's Special:Version page. |
| This extension is included in the following wiki farms/hosts and/or packages: This is not an authoritative list. Some wiki farms/hosts and/or packages may contain this extension even if they are not listed here. Always check with your wiki farms/hosts or bundle to confirm. |