Please let me do a little research before responding. Among other reasons, I seem to remember finding other solutions to your WAP needs that may work better for you.
Thanks for the interest and feedback.
Thread Starter
Bowo
(@qriouslad)
Woah!… That was super quick reply!… Thanks a lot!… and I look forward to hear more.
I wonder if you could look at a couple of other plugins to see if one of them isn’t better suited to your Task. If not, I will do a little more research:
- http://wordpress.org/plugins/device-theme-switcher/
- http://wordpress.org/plugins/51degreesmobi/
In more general terms, I should mention that some major WordPress sites like my local newspaper’s, use themes or plugins that automatically create what appears to be a parallel web site for their mobile visitors, typically in the subdirectory /m/.
For Themes, there is a whole concept called Responsive that deals with this.
For plugins, this Search might help find the most popular ones, though you get a lot of false positives:
http://wordpress.org/plugins/search.php?q=mobile&sort=popular
Here are two plugins I found that seem to deal with the subject:
http://wordpress.org/plugins/wptouch/
http://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-mobile-pack/
Like I say, not something I know much about. I just use the TwentyFourteen theme and find it does enough for my mobile users.
Thread Starter
Bowo
(@qriouslad)
Hi jonradio,
Apologies for the delayed response. Busy weekend with slow start this week. 🙂
Thank you for doing further research on the alternatives. While the mobile detection plugins you pointed out are great, they’re not what we’re looking for. We already have a device detection algorithm (old though) that will send visitors to separate mobile/WAP sites depending on their device type (feature phone, android, iphone, etc.). It is working well for our situation now, though we are looking to upgrade the whole setup using a newer device detection algorithm like the ones you pointed out. The one from 51degrees looks especially mighty! Thanks for pointing that out!
The mobile themes plugins are also something we are looking at, though that’s for the future and our WP site is already responsive using http://themeawesome.com/responsive-wordpress-theme/ with a custom child theme.
The reason we were using your plugin is because, we needed to keep the current redirection settings to the WAP sites, while being able to serve the WP site/pages from those WAP sites via an iframe. The more specific requirement is that we are using a glossary tooltip plugin that has a mouse-hover pop-up of special terms that won’t work outside of the WP site. We’ve explored using APIs, but that doesn’t seem to be a solution as well.
That said, we’re also looking into creating a PHP script (in the mobile/WAP site) to auto-append the trailing ?keyword=value on subsequent clicks within the iframe. Not sure how feasible that is, but it looks like being able to do that from the WP side is the best solution, thus the question in this thread in the first place. Please let me know your further thoughts on this.
On a related note, have you ever measured if there are any performance hits when using this plugin?… in other words, any difference in page load time using default theme vs alternate theme via ?keyword=value ? (obviously not easy to measure as each theme has their own weight), but perhaps, you know the stats from the way the plugin is coded and the alternate theme is summoned upon.
Thanks again!
~Bowo
Thread Starter
Bowo
(@qriouslad)
p.s. additionally, the whole site is not using WP at the moment, just the blog part of it. And the device detection + redirection to WAP site happens for the larger site. We want to embed the WP blog section/pages into the mobile/WAP version of the main site. Your plugin of course, is installed in the WP blog section.
Thanks for the explanation. I now have a much better understanding of what you are trying to accomplish. And can give you a definitive answer. Of course, “definitive” to me may just be plain wrong if I missed some subtle point. With that in mind, here goes.
An iframe to a non-WordPress web page leaves WordPress and my plugin “out of the picture” in the sense that “the_content”, or any of the other Filters and Hooks that WordPress provides, cannot allow my plugin to intervene and modify any part of the non-WordPress web page. The web server sends the non-WordPress web page directly to the user’s browser which means that WordPress “never sees it” and therefore cannot modify its content.
As for performance, by definition, any plugin adds code, which normally reduces performance. The only exception is performance-enhancing plugins that change how WordPress does something, improving its performance more than the plugin reduces it.
There is no meaningful way to quantitatively measure plugin performance because each web server has a different set of processors, which varies the amount of processor time each php statement takes to run. The other factor is network traffic to the user’s web browser. That can be measured, but performance is about time, and network speeds vary from one web server to the next, based on its connection speed to the Internet and how much other traffic is sharing it, and on the user’s connection to the Internet.
All that said, I have never detected any measurable slowdown when using my plugin. I’ve tried to be careful in my coding (I began programming in 1971), but with the large number of settings I’ve added over the years, plus support for specific plugins and themes that happens behind the scenes, there is a fair amount of PHP code executed for each page displayed.
Back to your design problem: if you want to stick with your current approach, I think you have to either have a cloned copy of your non-WordPress pages with all the links corrected. Or write your own PHP code (as a custom plugin just for your site) that replaces the iframe with a WordPress solution that actually inserts the non-WordPress web page into a WordPress page, modifying it during that insert process.
Thread Starter
Bowo
(@qriouslad)
Hi jonradio,
Thanks for further elaborating my reply… but I think I may be explaining it less than clear as you seem to have it backwards. What we want to achieve is non-WP WAP site having an iframe that loads a WP page with your plugin installed and with the ?keyword=value string in the URL… thus, loading an alternate theme inside the iframe.
And going back to my original question, would it make sense for you to develop a new feature for the plugin that will auto append the ?keyword=value string in the subsequent pages clicked from a URL already containing that string?… This way, we figure that, the WP page loaded inside the iframe (with the string) will maintain the alternate theme if users click on the link inside the iframed WP page.
I hope that clears things up a bit?
Thanks again!
Bowo
Sorry for the confusion on my part. Let me think about that for a bit. I’ll reply here as soon as I can.
I went through all the issues associated with adding a ?keyword=value string to the end of every link, and I just don’t think it would be feasible to find all links:
- in every part of a WordPress “web page”
- without accidentally appending to non-WordPress links
I just don’t think it is the best solution for you and anyone else with a similar kind of issue. Again, just my opinion.
What I am willing to explore is providing a Function that you can call from php that Sets the Theme using a Cookie that would reside in the browser cache of the visitor’s computer. And have a Setting that tells my plugin to check for a Cookie with the Theme Name in it, previously stored via that Function. Something like jr_mt_set_theme('TwentyTen');
The end result would be a single call to that Function would then see all (for some period of time, measured in days) subsequent WordPress web pages to that Visitor use that Theme.
Would that solve your problem?
Thread Starter
Bowo
(@qriouslad)
Thanks for looking into this even deeper…
I am not knowledgeable enough about how cookies work inside iframes, so, will pass on your reply to our lead developer for feedback.
From my perspective, it seems that there still needs to be a trigger such as the ?keywod=value string in the URL, which can be invoked from inside the iframe (as the source URL). If this cookie solution can be made to work that way, I think this will be a good workaround. What do you think?
Sorry if I wasn’t clear. I was committing to make my plugin look for the cookie on every WordPress “webpage” displayed, and change the theme if the cookie is there.
Since I wrote that, only issue that has come to mind is the possibility that a visitor (in your case, one of your WAP visitors) may have their browser set up to refuse cookies. I don’t even know if that is possible, as I have no knowledge of WAP.
Only other point is a small thing that I would add if you need it or not. Calling the Function with no parameters would delete the cookie and have my plugin go back to normal behaviour.
I guess I should also mention that the Cookie (if present) would override any theme choice that the plugin would otherwise make.
Only design point I’m not sure about is “how soon” the function call would take effect. In other words, should my plugin Refresh the current page with the specified Theme?
Thread Starter
Bowo
(@qriouslad)
Thanks!… While I am not knowledgeable enough to properly analyze your proposed solution, it looks like it may work. I will relay this to our lead developer. Please expect a couple of days or more before we can get back to you.
Thanks again!… Really appreciate your willingness to go this far.
Thanks for responding! The more I think about it, the more I like this solution. But, obviously, your lead developer may think of something I’ve missed, so I’ll wait to hear.
Thread Starter
Bowo
(@qriouslad)
Additional note… potentially related?
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7266107/best-way-to-determine-whether-a-webpage-is-viewed-in-an-iframe
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6662542/check-if-site-is-inside-iframe
http://www.daniweb.com/web-development/php/threads/430477/detect-if-page-is-being-loaded-inside-iframe
Source URL in iframe containing the right GET parameter would initiate the PHP function (you will have provide) to set a cookie with the alternate theme, and your plugin would do the work to change the theme. Conversely, sans the GET parameter, the PHP function would delete the cookie and ths, your plugin will revert the WP site to the default theme.
