detecting a PPC device on a webpage, best way?

bubazoo · 12-19-05, 10:06 PM

I am a beta tester for a new Forum software product called FusionBB, and the developers are researching the best way to detect a ppc device to automatically use a ppc formatted skin.

He was thinking of either getting a list of user agents, or detecting mobile devices based on cookie or session_id's

what do you guys think is the best way to auto-detect if a user is using a mobile device?

any code examples would be greatly appreciated :)
I think the idea of forum software supporting mobile devices is a great idea, so I want to help if I can, but i know very little about PHP.

Right now I am working on a template that works quite well with the new forum, but I don't know how to detect for mobile devices using PHP, anyone have any code I can use for this?

thanks

12-19-05, 10:08 PM

I'd say user agent strings.

bubazoo · 12-19-05, 10:11 PM

what are the majority of agent strings, I don't know all of 'em, only "pocket internet explorer" thats the only one I know of

gwinter · 12-29-05, 10:31 AM

MSDN is your best friend.

deftech · 01-02-06, 10:42 PM

Originally Posted by gwinter

MSDN is your best friend.

What MSDN fails to mention, however, is that by singling out "PPC" in the UserAgent string you will also affect how the site is displayed for some (but not all) Mac users. It's been awhile since I've dealt with this, but there were certain Mac browsers that had "PPC" in the string, of course standing for "PowerPC" in that case instead of PocketPC.

So just be sure to look up what the useragent string is for those Mac browsers, and be sure to isolate those users separately from the PocketPC users. That way Mac users will still get the full desktop version of the site.