How do I copy the default mobile Magento theme so I can customize it?

[KitiKatica]

I'm sure you've all heard by now Google's going to be ranking sites by how mobile-friendly they are two weeks from now, and our company website has no mobile version at all. A new layout was installed sometime last year by the previous web designer, but sadly it's not a responsive site and no mobile version was created. Unfortunately, because of how it's customized, simply turning on the default Magento mobile theme looks terrible. However bad our regular layout looks on mobile, it's still galaxies ahead of the default mobile theme.

So I've been wondering: how does one copy and alter the mobile theme that comes with Magento CE, as a child theme? Or better yet, how would I go about creating a new mobile theme altogether? It would be fairly basic visuals, but it needs to be done, and soon!

We are on version 1.7 (will eventually get to the latest version, but one step at a time)

[Theis Corfixen]

Hi @KitiKatica 

I would ofcourse mention that by default Magento 1.9 now comes with a responsive template. But I assumme upgrading might be a bit out of your scope for now.

In Magento's design configuration you have what is called Exceptions to each section. This makes it easy to precent a different layout depending on the user agent of the device that visits your site.  A quick google search and i found this article explaning how this works:

http://magebase.com/magento-tutorials/magento-design-exceptions-explained/

By using design exceptions you can set your default to be, the default mobile template name in your version. And then them template to be the name of your mobile template on top of that.

I hope this helps :-)