Our team has recently investigated whether the new release of Sitefinity CMS offers mobile support. As we expected, there was no built-in mobile support in Sitefinity 4.0 (unlike, for example, MS SharePoint). Here is a short description of how we planned to handle the situation.

How to add mobile support in Sitefinity 4.0

The only way to support mobile devices is to create a mobile branch of the website with its own page templates and CSS.

When a user opens the website from a mobile device, the application should detect the device type and browser version and redirect the user to the mobile branch of the site.

There are several ready-to-use widgets and themes, but all of them were developed for Sitefinity 3.7 and had not been tested with the 4.0 release yet. You may need extra effort to adjust them to Sitefinity 4.0. Below are the components we looked at while waiting for the first mobile themes compatible with Sitefinity 4.0.

Ready-made components for mobile sites

Sitefinity Mobile Starter Theme

Mobile Starter Theme is a lightweight theme designed for mobile browsers. It is free, and the source code is available.

Sitefinity Toolkit

This toolkit includes a Mobile Browser Detection control that detects whether a visitor uses a mobile device and switches the site to a mobile theme. It is free, but the source code is not available.

Response Redirect Control

Response Redirect is a user control that redirects a request to a specified URL when certain keywords are present in the user agent. You can use it to detect mobile browsers and send them to a mobile-friendly Sitefinity website. It is free, but the source code is not available.

Mobile support in Sitefinity today

Note: this article was written in 2011. Later versions of Sitefinity CMS added responsive design support, so a separate mobile branch is rarely needed for new projects.

Read also: RadWindow with Sitefinity 4 and mobile app or mobile website.