Thursday 30th May 2013

New mobile site for PistonHeads

Use your phone to browse the PH classifieds? Good news - it's got a whole lot fancier

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Earlier today our dedicated team of hamsters launched our new mobile site, so if you access the site from your smartphone, you'll notice that things look different. Hopefully you'll like what you see, as we've been testing it extensively with a team of volunteers over the past few months.

Here's what you need to know about the new mobile site:

- It'll all be served at www.pistonheads.com. So no more m. or mobile. urls.

- It works by detecting the device you're accessing PistonHeads from, and then automatically serving a layout for that device. At present we're continuing to serve the desktop site to tablets, but any smartphone will see the new site.

- Right now, the homepage and classifieds site are live using the new mobile site. News articles and forums will continue to direct to the existing mobile site until we get those finished.

- You can still opt out and see the desktop site on your mobile, but we'd encourage you to give the new site a go, particularly when searching for cars for sale.

- We've tested it against a wide variety of the common browsers and devices people access PH from. However if you're on some very, very new device or very, very old device, some things might look odd. If you see weird things, capture a screen grab and post it on the thread below.

Please do tell us of any bugs, improvements, or even things you like about the site. We'll take all of these on board and are, as ever, fully expecting you to tell us what you think.

To go directly to the new site from your smartphone, click here.

[alock]

I've had no problems with the mobile site for weeks...... until now.

Now I just get this on the forums.

[lawdevice]

Sooo much better!

Love the filters and SOTW search.

Nice work guys.

[2.5pi]

http://www.pistonheads.com/gassing/whatsnew.asp?h=...

Gives me an error message on my iPad , can't access forums

[Stuart]

2.5pi said:

http://www.pistonheads.com/gassing/whatsnew.asp?h=...

Gives me an error message on my iPad , can't access forums

Thanks. Not directly connected to the mobile site, but partially. We're on the case with that. Incidentally you'll see nothing different on iPad - we're treating that as a desktop site, essentially.

[Funk]

Ironically mobile.pistonheads.com URL gets me in. I'm also getting some weird pagination issues when it has loaded...

[Stuart]

Thanks Funk. What were you trying to access?

We've got a number of different redirects in place at present we're just mopping up immediately post launch, so things are changing rapidly as we go through those.

[Funk]

Stuart said:

Thanks Funk. What were you trying to access?

We've got a number of different redirects in place at present we're just mopping up immediately post launch, so things are changing rapidly as we go through those.

I clicked the 'Used Cars' option on this page:

(Pic nicked from above to save uploading another one...!)

Cleared cache etc, still no go.

[Stuart]

Hmm. That's fixed for us now, so keep trying and you should be good.

[mikebradford]

already looks better than autotrader

[Funk]

Stuart said:

Hmm. That's fixed for us now, so keep trying and you should be good.

Ok, I'm in. But my pagination issues are thus:



and an actual search dumps me back to the error page...

Edit - this happens on Chrome, Maxthon and the built-in browser in Android (although it paginates properly in the last two on the search page).

Edited by Funk on Thursday 30th May 17:45

[jeremyc]

mobile.pistonheads.com/classifieds still shows the old site for me.

(HTC Wildfire, Android 2.2.1).

Same result if I click on 'classifieds' from the home page I get to from mobile.pistonheads.com (I can't tell if the homepage itself has changed ).

[Stuart]

jeremyc said:

mobile.pistonheads.com/classifieds still shows the old site for me.

(HTC Wildfire, Android 2.2.1).

Same result if I click on 'classifieds' from the home page I get to from mobile.pistonheads.com (I can't tell if the homepage itself has changed ).

JC - just go to www.pistonheads.com from your mobile. Ignore mobile. for the time being.

[Stuart]

Funk said:

Ok, I'm in. But my pagination issues are thus:



and an actual search dumps me back to the error page...

Edit - this happens on both Chrome, Maxthon and the built-in browser in Android (although it paginates properly in the last two on the search page).

Edited by Funk on Thursday 30th May 17:44

Thanks Funk. What Android device? We observed a couple of issues with pagination on some very, very new browsers earlier today, so these are being fixed.

[Funk]

Stuart said:

Thanks Funk. What Android device? We observed a couple of issues with pagination on some very, very new browsers earlier today, so these are being fixed.

HTC One X on Android 4.1.1.

Edit: back to the error page every time now - can't get to the search page.

[Stuart]

Funk said:

HTC One X on Android 4.1.1.

Edit: back to the error page every time now - can't get to the search page.

Thanks, we'll deal with that pagination issue in the morning.

Devs are working on the various redirects in place between the old mobile site and what we released today right now, so you're going to get intermittent issues.

[airbrakes]

Two questions - why did the old mobile site not show the "garage" tab of PH members profiles? And has this new version rectified this?

[Stuart]

airbrakes said:

Two questions - why did the old mobile site not show the "garage" tab of PH members profiles? And has this new version rectified this?

The new mobile site hasn't got to that bit of the site yet - so far just homepage and classifieds. We're at design stage for forums/members and I'm sure that we can do that for you when we get to it. However the reality is that those pages aren't visited by a lot of people, so it won't be as high a priority as getting the core forum stuff done properly.

Does that answer your question?

[airbrakes]

Stuart said:

The new mobile site hasn't got to that bit of the site yet - so far just homepage and classifieds. We're at design stage for forums/members and I'm sure that we can do that for you when we get to it. However the reality is that those pages aren't visited by a lot of people, so it won't be as high a priority as getting the core forum stuff done properly.

Does that answer your question?

Excellent, thanks

I was just curious as to why it seemed to be the only function missing from the current mobile site - I tend to use it a lot when reading through threads and someone mentions their car

[Stuart]

airbrakes said:

Excellent, thanks

I was just curious as to why it seemed to be the only function missing from the current mobile site - I tend to use it a lot when reading through threads and someone mentions their car

There are a lot of pages on the current mobile site which weren't ever "mobilised" very simply because we didn't think that many people were ever likely to reach them from a mobile site. Just a question of resource vs return really, but we will work our way through all of it this time.

[Krikkit]

Looks pretty damn good, I'm getting the same issues as Funk on a Moto Razr HD on Android 4.1.2 with the stock browser. Same with firefox too.