Extension:MobileFrontend

MediaWiki extensions manual

MobileFrontend Release status: stable
Description	Provides a mobile-friendly view
Author(s)	Patrick Reilly, Max Semenik, Jon Robson, Arthur Richards, Brion Vibber, Juliusz Gonera, Ryan Kaldari, Florian Schmidt, Rob Moen, Sam Smith
MediaWiki	1.23+
PHP	5.3+
License	GNU General Public License 2.0 or later
Download	Download snapshot (Git master) Git [?]: repo summary browse file tree commit history code review README
Example	Any Wikimedia Foundation wiki
Parameters See below
Added rights mf-uploadbutton
Hooks used RequestContextCreateSkin BeforePageRedirect SkinTemplateOutputPageBeforeExec TestCanonicalRedirect ResourceLoaderTestModules GetCacheVaryCookies ResourceLoaderRegisterModules APIGetAllowedParams APIAfterExecute APIGetParamDescription APIGetDescription UnitTestsList GetBetaFeaturePreferences
Translate the MobileFrontend extension if it is available at translatewiki.net
Check usage and version matrix; code metrics
Issues:	Open tasks · Report a bug

The MobileFrontend extension provides a mobile-friendly view. This page is designed for end users who want to install it on their development instance. If you are keen to help us build it and improve it we encourage you to get involved.

§Prerequisites

• Although MediaWiki doesn't require it, PHP must have mbstring support for this extension to work (Task T62174).
• Release for MediaWiki <= 1.24 of MobileFrontend requires the extension Mantle.

§Installation

• If using Vagrant, install with vagrant enable-role mobilefrontend && vagrant provision

Manual Installation

• Download and place the file(s) in a directory called MobileFrontend in your extensions/ folder.
• Add the following code at the bottom of your LocalSettings.php:

require_once "$IP/extensions/MobileFrontend/MobileFrontend.php";
$wgMFAutodetectMobileView = true;

• If necessary configure at your convenience
• Done! Navigate to "Special:Version" on your wiki to verify that the extension is successfully installed.

§Configuration settings

The following variables can be defined in LocalSettings.php after calling require_once "$IP/extensions/MobileFrontend/MobileFrontend.php";. Note that for a simple site adding $wgMFAutodetectMobileView = true; might be all you need to make it Just Work™.

Setting name	Default value	Description
$wgMFDefaultSkinClass	'SkinMinerva'	The default skin for MobileFrontend; defaults to SkinMinerva
$wgMFUseCentralAuthToken	false	Allow editing (uploading) to external CentralAuth-enabled wikis where the user might not be logged in.
$wgMFPhotoUploadEndpoint	''	URL of MediaWiki API entry point to which upload images. If it's an empty string, upload locally.
$wgMFUploadMinEdits	0	Specify how many edits a user need to use mobile upload.
$wgMFNearbyEndpoint	''	An optional alternative API to query for nearby pages, e.g. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/api.php. If set forces nearby to operate in JSONP mode.
$wgMFContentNamespace	NS_MAIN	The content namespace(s) that Special:Nearby and Special:Random should use. Should be one or more of NS_* constants, pipe-separated.
$wgMFPhotoUploadWiki	null	ID/database name of the wiki with uploaded images. If null, use local database.
$wgMobileFrontendLogo	false, default no logo	URL to the logo used in mobile login and signup form. Should have a height of 72px. Example: "{$wgScriptPath}/mf-logo.png" for the file mf-logo.png in your wiki's root folder.
$wgMobileUrlTemplate	''	Template used to transcode regular URLs into mobile URLs (optional, and probably an overkill for low-traffic sites). Can either be set as a static domain (eg 'mobile.mydomain.com'), or can use a template based off the host portion of your desktop domain. The token '%h0' represents the first portion of the hostname, '%h1' the second, and so on. For example, to achieve http://en.m.wikipedia.org from http://en.wikipedia.org, you would use: %h0.m.%h1.%h2
$wgMobileFrontendFormatCookieExpiry	null	The number of seconds the 'useformat' cookie should be valid (used to keep you on mobile or desktop view of site when manually toggling between the two). If unset, defaults to $wgCookieExpiration.
$wgMFRemovableClasses	array( // These rules will be used for all transformations 'base' => array(), // HTML view 'HTML' => array(), )	Make the classes, tags and IDs stripped from page content configurable. Each item will be stripped from the page. The extension adds some classes by default.
$wgMFCustomLogos	array( array() )	Makes the logos configurable. Example: array( 'site' => 'mysite', 'copyright' => 'img.jpg' ) Note that 'copyright' controls the image shown in the footer of the mobile page.
$wgMFNoindexPages	true	Set to false to allow search engines to index your mobile pages. So far, Google seems to mix mobile and non-mobile pages in its search results, creating confusion.
$wgMFStopRedirectCookieHost	null	Set the domain of the stopMobileRedirect cookie. If this value is not set, it will default to the top domain of the host name (eg en.wikipedia.org = .wikipedia.org). If you want to set this to a top domain (to cover all subdomains), be sure to include the preceding '.' (eg .wikipedia.org NOT wikipedia.org).
$wgMFEnableDesktopResources		Whether or not to load desktop-specific ResourceLoader resources. Current usecase is for deciding whether or not to load JS for unsetting the stopMobileRedirect cookie.
$wgMFTrademarkSitename	false	Whether to append ™ to the sitename in page footer, or ® to the sitename for alt text in footer if using a custom copyright logo. Defaults off to avoid being confusing. You can also edit the MediaWiki:Mobile-frontend-footer-sitename interface message directly.
$wgDeviceDetectionClass	'DeviceDetection'	Name of the class used for mobile device detection, must be inherited from IDeviceDetector
$wgMFNearby	false	Whether geodata related functionality should be enabled, such as Special:Nearby. Requires GeoData extension.
$wgMFNearbyRange	10000	The range in meters that should be searched to find nearby pages on Special:Nearby (defaults to 10km).
$wgMFMinCachedPageSize	64 * 1024	Pages with smaller parsed HTML size are not cached. Set to 0 to cache everything or to some large value to disable caching completely.
$wgMFAutodetectMobileView	false	Whether or not the MobileFrontend extension autodetects devices for mobile view on its own, rather than using detection at the proxy/webserver layer, or using third party tools like Apache AMF. Depending on your setup, this is probably the easiest method of device detection, though least performant. If this option is set to true file cache must be disabled by setting $wgUseFileCache to false (otherwise autodetection won't be reliable due to cached copies being shown).
$wgMFEnableSiteNotice	false	Controls whether site notices should be shown.
$wgMFShowMobileViewToTablets	false	Controls whether tablets should be shown the mobile site. Works only if $wgMFAutodetectMobileView is true.
$wgMFPhotoUploadAppendToDesc	''	(wiki)text to append to photo description during photo upload.
$wgMFEnableXAnalyticsLogging	false	Whether or not to enable the use of the X-Analytics HTTP response header. This header is used for analytics purposes; see Analytics/Kraken/Data Formats/X-Analytics.
$wgMFAnonymousEditing	false	Whether to respect $wgGroupPermissions or not: if set to false, disables editing for unregistered users. No major bugs with anonymous editing are currently known: you are encouraged to set the setting to true and report problems.
$wgMFLeadPhotoUploadCssSelector	'img, .navbox'	A CSS selector which is used by mf-photo.js to test whether to prompt the user photo uploads on the current page. When the selector matches no elements the photo uploader will show. Warning: This is an advanced config variable so use caution in editing.
$wgMFEnableCssAnimations	true	Enable CSS animations in all browsers that support them
$wgMFNoMobileCategory	false	Database key (=page title with underscores instead of spaces etc.) of the category which members will never display mobile view
$wgMFNoMobilePages	array()	Prefixed names of pages that will never display mobile view
$wgMFAjaxUploadProgressSupport	true	Temporary boolean variable to enable/disable progress bars in the photo uploader
$wgMFDeviceWidthTablet	768	Minimum available screen width (in pixels) at which a device can be considered a tablet/desktop
$wgMFDeviceWidthMobileSmall	280	Devices with available screen of this value and less will have some styles adapted for improved reading on small screens.
$wgMFKeepGoing	false	Whether or not to use the KeepGoing feature.
$wgMFTidyMobileViewSections	true	Controls whether API action=mobileview should have every HTML section tidied for invalid markup
$wgMFMobileHeader	'X-WAP'	Requests containing header with this name will be considered as coming from mobile devices. The default value is for backwards compatibility. Set to false to explicitly disable this way of detection.
$wgMFEnableMinervaBetaFeature	false	Controls whether the "Minerva as a desktop skin" beta feature is enabled
$wgMFEnableNearbyPagesBetaFeature	false	Controls whether the "Nearby pages" beta feature is enabled
$wgMFCollapseSectionsByDefault	true	Controls whether to collapse sections by default. Leave at default true for "encyclopedia style", where the section 0 lead text will always be visible and subsequent sections may be collapsed by default. Set to false for "dictionary style", sections are not collapsed.
$wgMFAppPackageId	false	ID of the App to deep link to replacing the browser. Set false to have no such link. See https://developers.google.com/app-indexing/webmasters/details
$wgMFAppScheme	'http'	Scheme to use for the deep link. Per default, 'http' is used.
$wgMFPageActions	array( 'edit', 'talk', 'upload', 'watch' )	Controls, which page action show and which not. Allowed: edit, talk, upload, watch
$wgMFEnableBeta	false	Whether beta and alpha modes are enabled.
$wgMFSpecialCaseMainPage	true	If set to true, main page HTML will receive special massaging that removes everything but a few select pieces.
$wgMFNamespacesWithoutCollapsibleSections	array( // Authorship and licensing information should be visible initially NS_FILE, // Otherwise category contents will be hidden NS_CATEGORY, // Don't collapse various forms NS_SPECIAL, // Just don't NS_MEDIA, )

§Configuring mobile browser auto detection

See /Configuring browser auto-detection

§Configuring the main page

Main article: Mobile main page formatting

By default, the Main Page on the mobile site is the same page as on desktop. To show an optimized version of your Main page to your mobile users you can disable the desktop Main page simply by following these two rules to add mobile specific content:

• A selector that is prefixed with mf- will be added to the mobile main page for any project. Any title attributes set on these elements will be promoted into a heading before the section. A title attribute is optional.
• Any element with the class 'nomobile' will not show on mobile.

For example:

<div id="mf-blog" title="Wikimedia Blog">Hello</div>

would create a section named Wikimedia Blog with the text 'Hello'.

After you saved your Main page, on mobile devices you will see only the sections you added following these rules.

§Install Nearby

MobileFrontend provides the Special:Nearby page with a little configuration. To get this to work a few optional steps are required:

• Install GeoData
• Run update.php
• in LocalSettings.php add $wgMFNearby = true
• Add data to your articles to one or more pages {{#coordinates:37.786971|-122.399677|primary}} see the documentation for GeoData for syntax details

Alternatively you can use an alien MediaWiki instance for Nearby with the following 2 lines in your LocalSettings. The nearby endpoint will be used to find related content to a given location.

$wgMFNearbyEndpoint = 'http://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/api.php';
$wgMFNearby = true;

§Additional tweaks

Get the most out of MobileFrontend by adding these other optional dependencies:

• Extension:Geodata - get Special:Nearby and geotag your articles
• Extension:PageImages - adds images to search and nearby results
• Extension:VisualEditor - add Visual editing to your mobile experience.

§CSS Styling

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

§More information

If you would like to test the mobile extension on a desktop browser or your device doesn't render the mobile version, you can append the following key-value pair to the query string: useformat=mobile e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Schuldiner?useformat=mobile

If you would like to see the wap version of the mobile extension, use ?useformat=mobile-wap instead.

If you would like to view a page in the beta without enabling it across the entire site you can append to the query string of any page ?mobileaction=beta

If you would like to force your wiki to always display in mobile view, add the following to your LocalSettings.php:

MobileContext::singleton()->setForceMobileView( true );

§API

§Extended action=parse

Warning:

mobileformat parameter calling style have changed and current usage will be deprecated. See https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-api/2013-October/003131.html for details.

action=parse receives the following extra parameters:

mobileformat={html|wml}

Return rendered page in a mobile format, HTML for modern phones or WML for dumb phones.

noimages

Disable images in mobile output.

mainpage

Apply mobile main page transformations.

Example:

api.php?action=parse&page=Therion_(band)&mobileformat=html&prop=text&format=json

{
"parse": {
"title": "Therion (band)",
"text": "\n<table class=\"metadata plainlinks ambox ambox-style ambox-Copy_edit\" style=\"\"><tr>\n<td class=\"mbox-image\">\n<div style=\"width: 52px;\"><img alt=\"\" src=\"\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/commons\/thumb\/5\/52\/Acap.svg\/36px-Acap.svg.png\" width=\"36\" height=\"40\"><\/div>\n<\/td>\n<td class=\"mbox-text\" style=\"\">

. . .

§action=mobileview

mobileview
Prefix
Required rights	none
Post only?	No
Help	Current
Version added	X.X

Delivers content optimized for mobile devices for use by mobile apps and dynamic section views. Almost like a restricted-functionality action=parse, but more flexible and returns separate sections that are always obtained from full-page parse.

Parameters:

page

Title of page to process.

sections

Pipe-separated list of section numbers for which to return text or all for all sections.

redirect

Whether redirects should be followed, yes (default) or no. This parameter is intentionally made similar to the one to index.php.

prop

Which information to get:

• text: HTML of selected section(s)
• sections: Information about all sections on page
• normalizedtitle: Normalized page title, will be returned only if it differs from the specified one.

sectionprop

What information about sections to get: pipe-separated list of value types defined by parser. It's the same as in action=parse: toclevel, level, line, number, index, fromtitle, anchor. "byteoffset" has been excluded as it makes no sense for this action.

noimages

Return HTML without images.

noheadings

Return HTML without headings.

Returned section information also includes the id for every section - its zero-based number; and for sections that contains references added by Cite, there's also references data member.

Examples:

• api.php?action=mobileview&page=Extension:MobileFrontend/Example&sections=0&prop=text|sections&format=json

{
	"mobileview": {
		"sections": [
			{
				"id": 0,
				"text": "<div id=\"content\"><p>Hi<sup id=\"cite_ref-0\" class=\"reference\"><a href=\"#cite_note-0\">[1]<\/a><\/sup><\/p></div>\n"
			},
			{
				"toclevel": 1,
				"line": "This is first section",
				"id": 1
			},
			{
				"toclevel": 2,
				"line": "This is nested section",
				"id": 2
			},
			{
				"toclevel": 1,
				"line": "References",
				"id": 3,
				"references": ""
			}
		]
	}
}

Same request for XML: api.php?action=mobileview&page=Extension:MobileFrontend/Example&sections=0&prop=text|sections&format=xml

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<api>
  <mobileview>
    <sections>
      <section id="0" xml:space="preserve">&lt;div id=&quot;content&quot;&gt;&lt;p&gt;Hi&lt;sup id=&quot;cite_ref-0&quot; class=&quot;reference&quot;&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;#cite_note-0&quot;&gt;[1]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
</section>
      <section toclevel="1" line="This is first section" id="1" />
      <section toclevel="2" line="This is nested section" id="2" />
      <section toclevel="1" line="References" id="3" references="" />
    </sections>
  </mobileview>
</api>

§prop=extracts

Migrated to TextExtracts

§action=wikigrokresponse

Provided by a seperate Extension WikiGrok Logs each claim in a WikiGrok response with the MobileWebWikiGrok schema.

Parameter	Type	Description	Required
page_id	integer	The ID of the page the user is WikiGrok viewing on.	yes
user_token	string	A unique token to indentify a single user.	yes
subject_id	string	The WikiData ID of the subject of the page.	yes
subject	string	The label (in English) of the subject of the page.	yes
task_token	string	The unique token of the WikiGrok instance.	yes
claims	string	The claims, the user has submitted (JSON encoded)	yes
source	string	The version of WikiGrok the user interacted with (e.g. A or B)	yes
mobile_mode	string	The mode the user is using MobileFrontend in (stable, beta, alpha)	yes
testing	boolean	Whether or not the user is testing WikiGrok.	no

§Using the mobile view

§WMF sites

On Wikimedia Foundation-run sites, we use Varnish caching servers to check the user agent of your device. If your user agent appears to be coming from a mobile device, the Varnish servers will set an appropriate 'X-Device' header for your request, and you will be redirected to the MobileFrontend version of an article. Alternatively, you can click 'Mobile view' in the footer of an article or append "useformat=mobile" to the query string to view an article in the mobile view.

Example:

Varnish server vcl config for X-Device

sub vcl_recv {
set req.http.X-Device = req.http.User-Agent;
}

If you are viewing the mobile version of article but wish to see the desktop-version of that article, you can click 'View this article on regular <SITENAME>' to switch back.

If you want to permanently disable the mobile view for your web browser, you can click 'Permanently disable mobile site', which will set a cookie instructing the WMF servers to always display the desktop version of the site.

§Non-WMF sites

For non-WMF sites, you can either set up your configuration to mimic how things are done at the WMF (doing device detection at the proxy layer and setting specific X-Device headers), or you can simply use "?useformat=mobile" to switch an article to use the mobile view.

§See also

• Mobile web browsers supported by MobileFrontend
• Extension:TextExtracts
• Wikimedia's MobileFrontend configuration file