This blog post is a follow up of earlier posts in Ektron-Mobile series. If you haven’t gone through them yet, here are the links.
https://suyati.com/optimize-website-mobile-ektron-part-1/
https://suyati.com/optimize-website-mobile-ektron-part-2/
Take your time to read them and come back. I will be here!
In this final part let us dig into the topics of “Geo Mapping” and “Mobile Preview” in Ektron.
Ektron provides options to preview your mobile contents before publishing them. This enables to test the compatibility of contents in various devices. Preview can be done for individual contents and pages.
Previewing contents:
Individual contents can be previewed in various mobile devices to test how adaptable they are with specific devices.
The following steps take you through content preview:
- Goto workarea
- Choose the content which needs to be previewed
- Click “Edit”
Now you will get a “Preview” button along with other buttons in the horizontal bar.
By clicking the “Preview” option you will be able to choose the preview options like, Device configuration and Orientation.
Once these settings are chosen click the preview button to preview the content.
Previewing Pages:
The Page Builder pages also can be previewed to test their mobile compatibility. Make sure that your page builder template has got toolbar enabled for it.
This can be verified by checking the template configuration in workarea.
Goto: Workarea>Settings>Template Configuration
(The highlighted portion shows whether Toolbar is enabled/disabled for certain Page Builder Template.)
Now choose any of your page builder page form workarea and click “Edit Page Layout” option to see the page builder page in edit mode.
Now choose the “switch to view” option from the top menu bar of the Page Builder page. Along with this selection there will be a small “Switch Mobile Device” button at the corner of the menu bar. Click this button to see the various mobile devices through which the page can be previewed.
A snapshot of the same is as follows:
Preview from Apple iPad:
Preview from Ektron Smart Phones:
These preview options can be utilized by an Ektron Developer or a Marketer.
Geo Mapping
When it comes to a mobile website, the most important information that can be utilized from a site visitor is the visitor’s geo location data. This helps to provide a geographically aware web experience to the mobile site visitors by personalizing the web contents based on the geo location. Leveraging Geo Mapping capabilities of Ektron lets us achieve this.
Geo mapping can be implemented with two steps:
Step 1: Creation of Ektron contents with Geo location metadata
Provide valid Geo location metadata for contents in Ektron. This can be done by supplying the MapLatitude and MapLongitude information in the “Metadata” tab associated with the content. Or else, entering valid MapAddress information will automatically populate the corresponding MapLatitude and MapLongitude once the content got published.
Step 2: Creation of Mobile Template with Map Server control
Ektron’s out of the box “Map” server control comes with features that enables to show contents for specific locations. Which in turn means contents can be mapped to locations, and shown by means of this server control.
This actually makes use of the Geo location Meta data that is assigned to contents in Ektron. Also with the map server control, user can find the distance to a location and get the directions to a location.
A detailed explanation on using the map server control can be found here:
http://documentation.ektron.com/cms400/v9.00/Reference/Mobile/Advanced/Content/Server_Controls/sc_map.htm
Now this map server control can be used in Mobile Templates to provide a better “mobile” web experience to the users.
(Refer the earlier blog post in this series to know more about Mobile Template development in Ektron)
Thus by making use of the Ektron’s core mobile capabilities you can optimize your website for mobile with fewer efforts than that of maintaining an M DOT website.
Want to know more granular details about Ektron’s mobile capabilities? Got specific questions? Talk to our Ektron Experts.