Panels variants can easily be used to create a mobile version of your website. If you’re already using Panels, you need one module: Mobile Tools (http://drupal.org/project/mobile_tools). It contains a plug-in for Panels, making it easy to create a specific variant for mobile.
First, create your normal page layout using Panels. Then, create a second variant and when you add content (or in the content settings), choose "Mobile" for your build mode.
It’s as easy as that!
Other articles from this issue:
Features
Matthew Farina
The article discusses front end performance, it's importance including highlights on mobile devices, points to some helpful tools, and ends with 4 practical tips anyone can apply to their website.
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Bruno De Bondt
It’s 2011, and the world is going mobile. People don’t just use their desktop computer or laptop anymore to visit the sites you build. They’re coming at you with smartphones, tablets, TV screens, and who knows what they’ll bring next year. With all this device switching going on, one of the questions that site builders ask themselves: how can we keep up catering for all these different devices?
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Tom Geller
Is Drupal ready for mobile devices of the future? Will it be able to handle body-centered input and output? Tom Geller predicts the shape of tomorrow's mobile devices and discusses how Drupal will need to change to be ready for them.
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Comments
I think building a mobile site this way is a really bad approach I believe better results can be achieved by designing mobile first using media queries and CSS this way your site can scale from large screen devices to mobile with very little overhead.
Panels adds a lot of unnecessary overhead on the server PHP and MySQL resources wise.
You would get a better mobile site by using a theme like Omega which already provides you with the necessary media queries to adapt to different screen sizes.
I would also probably use the context module which should be lighter on resources panels. Mobile Tools can also be used the context module.
I firmly believe that site layout should stay in theme engine and people should not rely on contributed modules like panels for creating layout.
Otherwise I think mobile tools is an awesome module.