Manual:Mobiles, tablets and responsive design



MediaWiki will work on many mobile devices (ie. smartphones and tablets), but it is not optimized for mobile devices.

Unless you add additional skins or extensions, this means that sites may be difficult to view, with menus, layouts and media, not appearing in the best place.

None of the skins bundled with MediaWiki, including the latest default skin, skin>Special:MyLanguage/Skin:Vector|Vector, are optimized for use with mobiles.

This page provides advice for using MediaWiki on mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets.

Extensions

 * Extension:MobileApp (MW 1.22+) Simple app that serves styles and scripts for use in the Wikimedia mobile applications
 * Extension:MobileFrontend (Release for MediaWiki ≤ 1.24 of MobileFrontend requires the extension: Extension:Mantle) (1.23+) Provides a mobile-friendly view. Developed by Wikimedia, and used on Wikipedia. Installing only this extension by itself, will make your Mediawiki site mobile-friendly, and it includes its own skin.

Skins
You do not require an extension if you use a skin. Skins for use with mobile browsers come in two forms:
 * 1) Those designed specifically for use with a mobile, and may not view well on non-mobile devices. MediaWiki detects the kind of device on which it is running, and then switches to the appropriate skin. (See Extension:MobileDetect)
 * 2) WPtouch (MW 1.17+): A skin which formats your wiki with a mobile theme
 * Responsive skins, which are designed to respond automatically to the size of the screen, regardless of whether it is a desktop PC, tablet or smartphone.
 * 1) BootStrapSkin ($$$, MW 1.23+): three variations, and numerous colour templates
 * 2) Chameleon (MW 1.22+): customisable with five different layouts
 * 3) Metrolook
 * 4) Refreshed (MW 1.19+): uses responsive CSS to adapt to mobile devices
 * 5) Foreground (MW 1.18+): supports responsive (website)
 * 6) ...and more!

CSS
To apply CSS to a mobile skin, edit MediaWiki:Mobile.css, the counterpart of MediaWiki:Common.css.

Developers
See also: Making MediaWiki Mobile Friendly
 * Category:Mobile: Projects, extensions and other pages related to Mobile device development and presentation.
 * Wikimedia mobile engineering: responsible for creating, growing, and evolving how the diverse set of Wikimedia projects use mobile technologies
 * Manual:$wgResponsiveImages (MW 1.21+): Whether or not to output high-resolution images for high-DPI displays.
 * Extension:MobileDetect (MW 1.15+): allows users to control which content is displayed only in mobile browsers, or only on desktops
 * Mobile design: the central page for all mobile design projects.
 * Category:Mobile skins: Skins for mobile devices