On Wed, Mar 14, 2012 at 5:08 PM, Arthur Richards arichards@wikimedia.orgwrote:
To follow up on this, I actually made some additional changes to how "useformat" works to simplify manually switching between mobile and desktop views which had been suggested by Brion Vibber. Take a look at: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/113865
This removes the "Permanently disable mobile view" text (broken for anyone other than the WMF anyway) and makes it so accessing the site with "useformat=mobile" in the URL (eg by clicking 'Mobile view' at the bottom of any page on a site with MobileFrontend enabled) will set a cookie which will ensure that you see the mobile view until either the cookie expires or you explicitly switch back to desktop view.
It looks like "permanently disable mobile view" is broken completely as of last weeks mobilefrontend deployment. So its impossible to see how its supposed to behave currently, but a key part of it for wikipedia is that it takes you off the m site and disables squid's mobile redirection via the "stopMobileRedirect=true" cookie. It actually disables use of the .m. site as the text implies, not just disabling the mobilefrontend dom rewrite that you get when viewing the desktop version of a single article, which keeps you on the mobile site.
Replacing this with a "desktop view" that leaves users permanently accessing the desktop site via m. isn't suitable for our environment. It may make sense for smaller sites without a dedicated mobile namespace but even in that case, some care is needed to ensure that any frontend caching dosen't get inadvertently polluted or unduly fragmented.