Mobile Gateway/Mobile homepage formatting

If the main page (homepage) of your Wikimedia project has not been formatted to be viewed on mobile devices, and you are an administrator of that project, please follow the instructions below.

Please note: You must have administrator rights in order to edit the homepage.

Step 1
First, decide what content is suitable for the mobile homepage.

Evaluate the page elements in the desktop version (e.g. "Picture of the Day") by asking:


 * how popular are they?
 * are they updated regularly?
 * are they suitable for quick reading?
 * will they fit nicely in a mobile screen?

Once you decide which elements make sense, proceed to Step 2.

Step 2
You must be logged in and have administrative rights to do the following. On the desktop view of the homepage, click and find the elements you want to include in the mobile view.

Each element you want excluded from the page should be given a class "nomobile" or wrapped in an element with this class present.

What goes in between the opening and closing div tags? It will most likely be a template for the page element, such as "Picture of the Day".

Updating styles
Certain styles are not mobile friendly. For example any css rules which make use of fixed pixel size e.g. width, height, padding. If different style treatment is needed please use the Extension:TemplateStyles or port these styles to MediaWiki:Common.css or MediaWiki:Mobile.css.

Some tips on common problems are addressed @ Making MediaWiki Mobile Friendly.

Click "".

You are almost done.

Step 3
Now go to the mobile URL, which is typically languagecode.m.project.org. You can reduce the width of your desktop browser to mimic a mobile screen. How does the page look?

If you want to make changes, go back to Step 2. Keep going from Step 2 to Step 3 until you are satisfied.

That's it!

MFSpecialCaseMainPage config variable
When MFSpecialCaseMainPage is enabled (which is disabled by default), it is possible to serve different content to mobile and desktop users. Use of this method is discouraged and deprecated as it only works on the `Main Page` and is a maintenance burden and should only be used as a stop-gap measure when transitioning your MediaWiki site to a mobile experience.

The homepages of each language version of Wikipedia and all of the other Wikimedia projects are diverse, so it is impossible to present a universal example. Nevertheless, to give some idea of how this might look on your site, here is the German version of Wikipedia: https://de.wikipedia.org/

If you click on the View source ("Quelltext anzeigen") tab next to "Lesen", you can see the wikitext and using your browser's Find feature, look for the string, "mf-".

In this case, the div tag for the mf selectors are part of larger page objects. Only someone familiar with that project's homepage formatting will understand this in detail.

Now go to: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/

The resulting mobile page will be visible. The sections of content corresponding to the mf selectors are rendered in the mobile view.