In recent years a major component for any popular site is to add some sort of mobile experience. By adding a mobile aspect of your site either in full or in part, you open it up to even more people. In the last few years as mobile phones have become more powerful and less money. Having a mobile phone that is capable of viewing a full sized normal webpage isn’t as heard of now as it was just a few years ago.

With phones being capable of viewing sites in full and as mobile markup, it can sometimes be harder to present the user with the experience they are looking for. Simply using the user agent can help but it doesn’t give a full indication if the user has there browser setup as full or mobile. There is another way that can be used to some extent and works on any phone with a properly implemented browser.

HTTP_ACCEPT, is a header that is sent from the browser to the server when requesting resources. Contained in this header is a description of what the browser is capable of accepting or is willing to accept. Using this header it is possible to help determine if the user is on a mobile phone viewing in “mobile mode” or as a full browser. By checking for “application/vnd.wap.xhtml+xml” you can be assured that the user is viewing the site on a “mobile” browser.


from django.http import HttpResponseRedirect
from django.conf import settings

class MobileMiddleware(object):
  def process_request(self, request):
    try:
      if(request.META.get('HTTP_ACCEPT', '').find("application/vnd.wap.xhtml+xml") >= 0):
        return HttpResponseRedirect(settings.MOBILE_SITE)
    except:
      pass
    return None

Setting this up as a middleware in your settings file, as well as adding a new directive in your settings file such as:

Settings.py


MOBILE_SITE = "http://m.domain.com/"

This will allow you to simple redirect users on viewing the site as “mobile” to be redirected to the mobile site. A couple things to keep in mind though. If you are using the same code and just using different templates for the main site and the mobile site, you will want to add in logic to make sure you don’t hit a continous loop. Since not all browers are written to full standard, this isn’t 100%, but nothing is this will just help in giving users a more seamless user experience.