ocPortal Tutorial: WAP your website
Written by Chris Graham, ocProducts
ocProducts has an official add-on that opens up your website to WAP powered cell-phones. This is a powerful add-on that allows significant functionality over the same data and community of your WWW website.The WAP add-on is available to registered users only, and available from our add-on database.
Table of contents
Functionality
Tip
By setting up a phone number custom profile field you could really integrate your website with mobile technology. Your ocPortal site could serve a telephone directory for participating users. This of course has obvious privacy ramifications though, so an alternative course of action would be to set up a Catalogue to do the same, but control it with tight access permissions.
Functionality includes:
- Logging in, and Joining - to interact from your phone
- Signing up to the newsletter - in case you forgot when you visited the WWW site
- Recommending the site - recommend your site to a friend there and then when at a party (because he/she won't be able to find his/her keys in the morning, let alone remember to visit your site)
- Viewing Comcode pages - export information, available on the go
- Using Chat Rooms - chat with your community even when you're away from your computer
- Viewing CEDI - access the collaborative database when you're out and about
- Viewing news, and reading and making comments
- Viewing information on members - find how to get in contact by alternative means
- Opening and closing your site - in case you realise you left your passwords in a screen-shot, when at the airport
- Making backups - your crazy co-admin just rung you up to tell you how he has started deleting one piece of content from your website every hour, just after you tried out the explosive floppy disk he sent you in the mail
- Adding news - report back when on holiday
- Setting the community message - report back to gloat to your community that you are lazing on the beach
- Viewing the calendar, and the subscribers to events - you got on the train, but you forgot the directions to the venue and need to re-check that event
- Adding to the calendar - you just remembered that tomorrow is Christmas (<substitute other festival as appropriate>) and want to remind everyone - but you are away from the computer
- Viewing catalogues - directories of information available to you, wherever you may be
- Using the forum - to keep in touch when you're away
- Reading and starting personal topics - to tell your co-admin to stop deleting your files
Viewing WAP
If the WAP add-on is installed, and if ocPortal knows your phone to some degree, going to your base-URL should load up WAP. If it does not, however, go to <base-URL>/wap.php.What to edit
You may want to edit 'wap.wbmp' to include your own logo. A free WBMP tool is called 'dissect', but please for your own sake, do not look at the search engine results for that!The nature of WAP means that there are no standard menus. Instead, you need to edit the 'WML_START' and 'WML_CC_INDEX' templates to provide the links you wish. In particular, you are likely to want to:
- link in specific Comcode pages to 'WML_CC_INDEX'; the first link in this file is given as an example for how to tie in Comcode Pages with WAP
- change links on 'WML_START' to have more appropriate titles
- link in directly to appropriate and appropriately titled catalogues, rather than just linking to the catalogue list
- remove links that you do not want
Technical details
The WAP add-on is written for WAP-1, meaning it should work with any WAP phone. WAP-2 allows much richer web-pages, but small mobile screens mean that the additional features do not add much of value.The 'WBMP' format is the graphics format used for WAP-1. It is a very simple 2-colour format. If you don't mind your image(s) not working with WAP-1 phones, this is one area where you could use alternative formats, such as PNG.