One of the most powerful features of Mobify is its template matching engine. We still get asked whether it’s necessary to mobify every single page on one’s site (the answer is definitely not). Let us take this opportunity to share some details about how template matching works.
Most web publishers have a lot of content pages (blog posts, articles, news) that accumulate years of information. However, most of these are based on several core templates (one for the front page, one for an article, one for category listings). It makes sense to apply the same mobile design decisions to all pages based on a template and Mobify does exactly that. How does it know what template to apply? By looking at the URL patterns and HTML structure.
Take A List Apart, for instance. The “Unwebbable” article by Joe Clark has this URL: http://m.alistapart.com/articles/unwebbable/ . It shares the same page structure as all other articles:
http://m.alistapart.com/articles/the-inclusion-principle/
http://m.alistapart.com/articles/introduction-to-rdfa-ii/
http://m.alistapart.com/articles/visual-decision-making/
…and many, many others. See how all the links are similar? Mobify detects this instantly, applying the web designer’s content and style choices to any A List Apart article.
In order to mobify all pages based on a certain template, past and future ones, it’s only necessary to choose mobile content for one page based on that template. This is key to the entire workflow of Mobify – figuring out what the templates are and quickly going through the Choose process for one page (we call these “Blueprints”. If you’ve no idea what templates your site has, check out the “Templates” tab in Manage for some suggestions). This also works for GET-based URLs – check out the recent http://smoothon.mobify.me as an example. It’s no coincidence that most of our showcase sites are powered by some kind of CMS – all of them generate clean URLs.
Is it necessary to have perfect URLs like these? Not really – Mobify’s engine is built with flexible regular expressions, controls to which will be exposed in an upcoming release. Even if your URLs are complex, you’ll be able to quickly adjust the template rules and mobify even the biggest sites in a matter of an hour or two.
Tags: faq
