Excellent! This is much more elegant than what I came up with (I just used /m instead of a subdomain).

How about user-agent detection? What are best-practices on automatically routing users to the mobile version?

We go crazy with the path.php file here at Solspace. We added mobile device detection to the path.php file for a big client. People on a mobile get redirected to the mobile site right away, and then have an option to opt out and see the full site. We’ve found this to be pretty user friendly.

mk

With fitzage.com, I made all links between the desktop site and the mobile site completely compatible with a little rewrite action. Each site has its own templates and users are directed to the iPhone version if they are using an iPhone, but the links cane be shared easily between iPhone and Desktop users because they’re exactly the same.

Obviously this wouldn’t work for every site, but all content on fitzage.com is present in both, so there is no reason why one would need to go to the full site instead of the mobile site.

Oh, and to clarify: what you’ve done here looks really good, and it should make things easier for sites that don’t follow the pattern of my main site. Thanks!

Was just talking to someone at our church about how to handle the Spanish Campus and the Mobile viewers. Thanks for this article it will definitely come in handy on that project.

Hi Jamie,

I’d like to know more about your talk on Global path.php variables. I probably criminally under use them!

PS. Is the Erskine blog the new Jambor-ee?

Brilliantly simple! Didn’t even consider this, despite toying with MSM quite a lot recently. We’re currently looking at mobile sites and considering best ways to do it, but as far as structuring EE to handle it goes this is ace.

Indeed – the ability to simply create multiple (completely different) versions of a site is a great advantage to EE. We love doing this at iLounge:

http://www.ilounge.com/
http://www.ilounge.com/mobile/

Woops. I recently had to switch servers because I broke something on the other one, and my htaccess file didn’t make it over. fitzage.com does what it should now. :-)

Thanks for posting this. I recently set up a mobile version of a site using MSM, but as you said, it did seem like overkill at times. I’m really looking forward to trying this approach on some future projects of mine.

I assume this is only useful if the administrator or Editor has control of all sites?

I have been creating franchise based sites which do share the same templates but require member (admin/editor) segregation.

Nice trick. I’ll have to give it some serious consideration for a project we have coming up.

If I had one question, it’s this – what is the advantage of subdomain over domain/mobile?

If I had a second question, it would be – are there any Google issues? Be it crawling / indexing, using Analytics, or anything else for that matter?

Thx

Just got around to reading this. Thanks so much for sharing. It’s going to be very useful.

I have been using user-agent detection but I think this might be a better option as it gives the user a way to get to the full site. Well done and thanks!

path.php does have some extra tricks up it’s sleeve. Next to the $system_path variable you can also set some other variables in path.php, like $template_group to use a different 'default’ template group, instead of pv_site_version juggling. However, both solutions have their advantages. (EE wiki, running multiple subsites)

Thanks a lot for this tip ! It helped me set up the structure of the iphone and english version of a project I’m working on.

I also read some SEO blogs, and it looks like I’m gonna have to work on Two December’s website to make it use subdomains instead of folders for foreign version of the site. Looks like the best thing to do for alternate version (mobile, translated, etc…) of a website.

And I’ll use your method this time, which is much cleaner than the one I had set up when I was beginning with ExpressionEngine :)

@ Ben – Interesting? Might you be able to share that link(s) on SEO and / (slash) vs subdomain? If you’re country specific (and not so much language), might you be better off from an SEO perspective with .ca, .uk, etc.?

That said, as they say “Never design for search engines. Design for your users.” And as I believe Jamie mentioned above, in some places the users’ expectation is for subdomain, and others it’s / or maybe even .mobi.

Just curious… So are you going to do your subdomains by language (e.g., spanish.mysite.com) or some other naming convention? Do you think that has any SEO effect? As minor as it might be?

Great thread. It’s great to wake up everyday and realize I will never know it all :)

p.s. Anyone heard any good rumours on the official release of EE 2.0? Maybe they should just jump the release name to 3.0 and not get stuck smelling like a cheap web 2.0 whore in 12 months :)

The best article I found was one from Seomoz. It describes the pros and cons of each method : Root Domains, Subdomains vs. Subfolders :

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understanding-root-domains-subdomains-vs-subfolders-microsites

For Two December, I have a french version, an english version and a mobile version. Today, I’m using subfolders and the problem with french/english versions is that I oftenly have mixed results on Google of what I’m looking for. Sometimes english pages have a better rank in Google France than french pages… weird.

The country specific solution seems great (.fr, .es, etc…) and more intuitive for the user, but the downside is that you have to make powerful two different domains (looks easier to make 2 subdomains powerful).

That’s why I think that the next version of Two December will use subdomains, it should keep the pages as powerful as they are today (hope more of course, but you never know :)), and solve my problem of mixed english/french results.

And I can still use country specific domains to redirect to the subdomains :
twodecember,fr -> fr,twodecember,com

It’s not gonna help me at all with Google but it should help the users. Another thing that can be made to help them is create a “www,fr,twodecember,com” redirection. Too many people think this segment is required to get to a domain.

Great post and very intuitive what you mention… im however a little complexed at how this would work well for a multilanguage site.. but i might be missing something too… this way would create non-language specific URL titles if im not mistaken? and you would still have to either implement some langauge translation file or still have multiple custom fields for language specific content when entering a new weblog entry?

Like i say i might be missing something, and i know that its hard one when we are talking about multi langauge.. think it looks great for things such as mobile version and so on though.. .very nice indeed.

Thanks Jamie.. didnt think it would, but looks great for the mobile part… using on my own new site design.

Thanks for sharing!

Truth be told, I have zero experience with a multi-language site.

That being said, from a strict UI / UX perspective, I would suspect that language might be fairly synonymous with culture, and that in turn factors into UX.

In other words, just taking a site and changing the language might not yield the best results.

Finally, the latest issue of (US based) Internet Retailer mag – Ok, I agree, it’s not exactly top shelf reading material but none the less – has a list of companies with mobile sites. Might be a way to study up on possibilities, eh?

Yeah i thought it would need the multiple custom fields, as the language translation file i dont think would really cope with a full weblog entry for say a news item. I cant see it translating that correctly. Ive been looking into it as i was quoting for a multi language site today for a client and couldnt decide which way to do it.. each way seems to have its drawbacks, advantages and disadvantages.

With custom fields you could have fields for all languages in one entry, which would mean it would be well organised and easy to find, however i dont like the idea of lots of custom fields and i guess would also prefer language specific url titles etc… the other option although i think overkill but allows for more flexibility is seperated into MSM meaning that you could have unique content areas for each language, better url’s but the disadvantage of this would be that it would be much more work to add a new language as you would have to clone the site, edit the templates and any other language specific settings..

Have heard it might be possible to clone the entries using MSM but leave the actual templates on the original (default language) site so there is only one set of templates to control the layout etc.. but not tried this as yet. Maybe a mix of this and the multi language site alternative http://expressionengine.com/wiki/Multi_language_site_alternative/ would work well…

Like i said cant see any 1 way that works best…

I wish I would have posted tihs sooner but I wanted to ask… How do intended on being multi-language without having multiple languages :)

Another option might be to figure out some sort of crowd sourcing type idea such that a given article would be translated by the crowd and not the client. .Of course that open a can of auditing worms but maybe if the brunt of the work can be done by the crowd, the client can free up resources. But what was the client expecting? More content and no work to get there? Ok, don’t answer that :)

Moi? I’d be looking at MSM. Only because in my UX heart of hearts. Multi-lang != OSFA (one size fits all). It also implies a geographic and cultural component such that at some point a certain core of content might be shared but then there’s probably just as much content unique to a given language/culture/geo-location.

IMHO, of course ;)

Pardon me for jumpin’ right back in but now that I’ve thought about this a bit more…

I would think that groups/members/security might be an issue, no? In other words, EE’s permissions are defined at the weblog level. So if, for example, there was a single news weblog and a custom field for each language, that would mean each person entering and/or translating would have to have access to that weblog, as well as each other’s copy.

It depends on the organization but that typically might not be so wise, eh? I’d have to give some thought to a work around – there always is one – but my gut feeling is it might not be as pretty as one would hope.

Bottom line… take this to the EE forums. You’re likely to get some good input over there :)

Thanks for this post, on the off chance does anyone know how to do this without using the expression engine, i.e just make my website work on another domain or sub folder

Just wondering how this setup affects pagination, and certain links etc? For instance, the {auto_path} in pagination seems to insert the Site’s URL into the mix, negating the m. subdomain. Similarly, the {page_url} tag also seems to reference the full URL.

Of course, I’m possibly missing something very, very obvious… Anyone know how to get over these?

Already mentioned before, Path.php has some extra tricks up its sleeve. You can set some basic variables like site_url in there and the default template_group. Thus per directory.

Im about to finally give this a go over the next week, so will let you know how it goes.. been an interesting read so far.. but sometimes its easier to find out how this works in doing rather than just the discussion..

still big thanks to Jamie in the 1st place for sharing the info..

It depends on the organization but that typically might not be so wise, eh? I’d have to give some thought to a work around – there always is one – but my gut feeling is it might not be as pretty as one would hope.

Bottom line: take this to the EE forums. You’e likely to get some good input over there :)

Do you have updated instructions on how to do this for Expression Engine 2.0?

im waiting for the updated instructions too. anyone?

Would love to know how to do this in EE2, too.

As an alternative to copying files and having separate directories for both domains I’ve come up with the following for EE2.

Add the following code to your index.php file and make sure to edit the domain to look for.

if($_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'] == 'm.mydomain.com') {
    $assign_to_config['global_vars'] = array('is_mobile' => true);
  } else {
    $assign_to_config['global_vars'] = array('is_mobile' => false);
  }

This code will simply set a global var {is_mobile} to true if the site is being accessed by the m.mydomain.com subdomain. You can then use this global variable in your templates to show mobile or standard content.

in the current 2.1 build it is difficult to set the default template_group/template in the index.php
in the htaccess for the subdirectory you can catch this by a RewriteRule for when the RequestURI is empty. i.e

RewriteRule ^$ index.php?/template_group/index [L]

I’d love a simple step-by-step to setting this up on EE 2.1 as well.

@Fred & GDmac – no offense, but my knowledge of servers and the strange language they speak isn’t good enough to follow what you’ve got here!

I’m with James above. It would be awesome to get an EE2 version of this technique.

@Fred & GDmac – further elaboration would be awesome for dummies like me ; )

Fred’s example uses a bit of php to detect what (sub)domain-name a user requested and then set a global variable (is_mobile) accordingly. Next you can use that variable in your templates. (if is_mobile==“yes”)(embed=“group/page”)(/if)

I never liked this route because of the need for extra embedding and conditionals in the templates. In 1.6x, i would just point mobile.domain.com to another sub-directory on the server, and set the template_group and template in the path.php file. See: expressionengine com/wiki/Running_Multiple_Domains_or_Subdomains_or_Subsites/

For 2.x this functionality seems somewhat broken (setting the template_group and template in index.php overrules everything else), hence the following htaccess trick: If no document or uri is requested, then load and specific file (index.php?/template_group/template), while still showing the original uri the user entered.

RewriteRule ^$ index.php?/template_group/index [L]

Neo, i already linked to a more elaborate example on EE-forums, test it out on your local machine first! And/or ask your webmaster if in doubt!
See: expressionengine-com/forums/viewthread/163582/#800306

Thanks for the article, I am using this for EE 2.1.

Is there a engine related reason that you used the _ (underscore) in front of your subdirectory index names “_iphone_index” or is that just an internal nomenclature.

I tried to do implement it and we got the index, inside the index, inside the index recursively, it was quite interesting to see on the browser but not what I hoped for.

Thanks,
Chris

We have actual subdomains not subdirectories as used in your example. Could you please post the PV for subdomains? Thanks Chris

are any available plugins for EE 2.0?
I’m looking for such as “comments” like disqus..

Have just used this method, mixed with some of Fred Boyles suggestions above to do a multiple country setup for a client’s existing EE1 site. Easy peasy, thanks Jamie for the article.

Cheers
Brendan