Drupal and the Mobile World

I am currently at the NetSquared Conference in San Jose where we are exploring how non profits can use mobile technologies for their causes. Some of these non profit mobile applications include:

1) Digital Democracy's Handheld Human Rights (opens in new window): a tool for allowing human rights activists to learn about human right abuses as they happen via SMS messaging.

2) SeeClickFix (opens in new window): a mobile application for users to report non emergency policy issues such as graffiti and use the power of the crowd to voice these issues to the appropriate government bodies. I was looking at how Drupal can be developed and used to power some of these applications. Even though Drupal is developed primarily as a web content management system, there has been a few recent changes that allow for Drupal to power mobile web sites.

Some information about implementing mobile Drupal websites are:

1) Drupal Mobile Modules (opens in new window): allows for the creation of non styled version of node content.

2) Using Multi-Site to have mobile versions of a complete Drupal site. (opens in new window)

The challenge in creating mobile web sites is that there are a lot more browsers that need to be supported and that a lot of browsers do not follow the web standards. At the conference, we discussed how SMS technologies may be a better solution than Mobile web sites as SMS is used by more people in the world. Since Drupal supports web services such as XML RPC and SOAP, it is not that challenging to have a Drupal application communicate with the SMS gateways. If you are looking for a free SMS gateway, Tatango (opens in new window) is a great option.