Hi Stephen,

Can you tell me what happens when Metamod "hides" a module. 

I am asking this because on a mobile version of the site I am working on I want a certain module not just to be hidden, but not to be activated at all.

With Twitter-Bootstrap, as I understand it, visible-desktop will "hide" a module from showing on a mobile phone, but it will still be downloaded to the device.

I want to disable the module completely when a person is looking at the site on their mobile device. 

This particular module is very bandwidth intensive, which is why I want to disable -- not hide -- it on mobile device such as a cell and even a tablet which is often using limited bandwith -- such as wifi (at a Starbucks) or a dataplan.

Is disabling the module possible with Metamod? Or like twitter bootstrap is it only hiding the module -- meaning that the module will still be downloaded to the mobile -- but will only be hidden from view.

ALSO I assume the recipe you included here work for  all or most  android/iphones / devices

Thanks!

Rowby

Hi Rowby,

MetaMod controls whether or not the target modules will be rendered. That is, if the MetaMod decides NOT to include a module, none of the HTML of that module will appear in the output at all. Therefore as long as you can successfully detect the right type of device you are targeting, MetaMod will make very sure that the HTML does or does not appear for the target module.

Note that this is the opposite of "responsive" techniques (but it still has an important role). With responsive techniques you generally want some HTML to appear there for all devices, but it only gets shown/activated according to JS and/or CSS breakpoints.

So, if you have a situation where for certain detectable classes of devices you definitely do not want certain modules to appear, then MetaMod will do that for you.

The "categorizr" detection in JomGenius (which is also that used for "desktop/mobile/tv/tablet" detection in Chameleon) is a mobile-first algorithm which does a great job at detecting these general classes of device.

e.g. in MetaMod:

if (!$core_genius->check("categorizr = mobile")) return 123; // only show module 123 on non-mobile devices

or

if (!$core_genius->check("categorizr = mobile, tablet")) return 123; // only show module 123 on devices that are not mobile and not tablet


Hope that clarifies,
Stephen