XF 1.2 Responsive Design

In order to better support smaller-screen devices such as mobile phones and tablets, XenForo 1.2 will be introducing a responsive version of the default design.

What is responsive design? At the simplest level, it allows you to specify CSS that applies only if the screen width is below a certain level. This allows the design to be significantly altered to fit smaller screens. For example, tabular or horizontally-focused designs don't work well when you only have a screen that's 320px wide (an iPhone).

So, what options will XenForo provide?

ss-2013-05-24_11-33-30.webp


Here you can see that we provide 3 "inflection points". In general, they correspond to particular classes of devices.
  • Narrow (max width: 480px): phones vertical, some phones horizontal
  • Medium (max width: 600px): some phones horizontal, 7" tablets vertical
  • Wide (max width: 800px): 7" tablets horizontal, 10" tablets vertical
You can also disable the responsive design entirely. Specific pages can also opt out of the responsive design with a <xen:container /> line.

For add-on developers, many of your pages will automatically support the responsive design well. It really depends how much "default" CSS you are using. If you are creating multi-column layouts (such as some resource manager pages), you will need to write custom responsive versions. However, if you're just using standard systems like tabs and forms, you will automatically inherit the responsive changes.

The extent of changes on a page will really vary based on the width of a device. For example, "wide devices" (601-800px by default) will see mostly similar pages, but things like sidebars will be moved if needed.

But this is really more about screenshots. For ease of my job, I'm taking these screenshots in Chrome on a desktop machine. :) As always, this is a work in progress and things are still subject to change.

ss-2013-05-24_11-45-57.webp


This part does deserve special mention as it's very dynamic now. The short of it is that if there's not enough space to fit things (at any resolution), navigation/search options will be hidden as necessary and shown behind menus. User alerts/unread conversation counts will be folded into your user menu. If there is a selected navigation tab, it will always be shown as well.

These screens are all taken at the "narrow" level to show you the full extent of the possible changes.

ss-2013-05-24_11-49-35.webp ss-2013-05-24_11-50-00.webp ss-2013-05-24_11-50-46.webp ss-2013-05-24_11-51-04.webp ss-2013-05-24_11-52-22.webp ss-2013-05-24_11-53-06.webp ss-2013-05-24_11-53-36.webp
 
This seems not to be the width of the layout, it seems to be the resolution of the device to select which design should be used.
I'm gathering that. Not sure what value I would need to put in.

320 x 200
2560 x 2048

^ So that everyone would be happy.

You can use auto on css. It all depends on the content though....

There needs to be something more universal for all. This isn't a limitation with xenforo though, but rather perhaps the language code not yet catching up to the hardware. That's unusually rare.
 
I'm gathering that. Not sure what value I would need to put in.

320 x 200
2560 x 2048

^ So that everyone would be happy.

You can use auto on css. It all depends on the content though....

There needs to be something more universal for all. This isn't a limitation with xenforo though, but rather perhaps the language code not yet catching up to the hardware. That's unusually rare.

Leave the Values as they are. It looks like that they are not CSS properties!
 
Excellent... Waiting for 1.2 to release as soon as possible.. I have not even upgraded to 1.1.5 coz I have done direct modifications in few files and it will take time for me to do upgrade .. so now will spare time only for directly upgrading from 1.1.4 to 1.2 ;).. Mike please release this version as early as possible...
 
Can't wait to see what this is all about! (y)

I want mobile on my site! I WANT!

Anyhow, I have a question: Has this been tried on Samsung's new line of phones such as Nexus, Note, and whatnot? I've come to like Samsung's phones now over iphone.

Reason why I ask is, these phones are quite larger than iphone.
If I can enter the value of "auto" in those fields .... I'll be very excited indeed. ;)
See, Adam was ahead of me here.
 
In order to better support smaller-screen devices such as mobile phones and tablets, XenForo 1.2 will be introducing a responsive version of the default design.

What is responsive design? At the simplest level, it allows you to specify CSS that applies only if the screen width is below a certain level. This allows the design to be significantly altered to fit smaller screens. For example, tabular or horizontally-focused designs don't work well when you only have a screen that's 320px wide (an iPhone).

So, what options will XenForo provide?

View attachment 46726

Here you can see that we provide 3 "inflection points". In general, they correspond to particular classes of devices.
  • Narrow (max width: 480px): phones vertical, some phones horizontal
  • Medium (max width: 600px): some phones horizontal, 7" tablets vertical
  • Wide (max width: 800px): 7" tablets horizontal, 10" tablets vertical
You can also disable the responsive design entirely. Specific pages can also opt out of the responsive design with a <xen:container /> line.

For add-on developers, many of your pages will automatically support the responsive design well. It really depends how much "default" CSS you are using. If you are creating multi-column layouts (such as some resource manager pages), you will need to write custom responsive versions. However, if you're just using standard systems like tabs and forms, you will automatically inherit the responsive changes.

The extent of changes on a page will really vary based on the width of a device. For example, "wide devices" (601-800px by default) will see mostly similar pages, but things like sidebars will be moved if needed.

But this is really more about screenshots. For ease of my job, I'm taking these screenshots in Chrome on a desktop machine. :) As always, this is a work in progress and things are still subject to change.

View attachment 46727

This part does deserve special mention as it's very dynamic now. The short of it is that if there's not enough space to fit things (at any resolution), navigation/search options will be hidden as necessary and shown behind menus. User alerts/unread conversation counts will be folded into your user menu. If there is a selected navigation tab, it will always be shown as well.

These screens are all taken at the "narrow" level to show you the full extent of the possible changes.

View attachment 46729 View attachment 46730 View attachment 46731 View attachment 46732 View attachment 46733 View attachment 46734 View attachment 46735

The decision of making the Max Responsive Width configurable seems a little odd to me, since it seems to push to the webmaster the burden of deciding how tall or wide is the device.

The truth is, this information is better of mantained by XenForo and being non-configurable. After all, an iPhone does not necessarily get bigger from one month to the other, and there is a soft spot for a narrow design. The 320 pixels width that the iPhone has might as well be hardcoded.

To err con the safe side, instead of 320Px might as well go to 480 to capture all the droids. Or rather, go to 720px to also capture the Samsung Galaxy that is on the wild. After that, we can safely assume that we are dealing with a tablet size.

My point is that these kind of decisions is something that needs to be researched by XenForo, since it is your responsbility to make sure that the default style looks beautiful in all devices.

On a last note, since I am sure you have Google Analytics. Do you have the "top" resolutions that the users have for mobile devices? I know that GA tracks that information and it is incredibly useful to figure out which are the screen resolutions to optimize the design for.
 
Very nice and very excited to get a play with 1.2 :)

A question: will there be a go to full site button in the footer for users to click on which will disable responsive for them? And then a go mobile view button to go back if they wish.

The reason why is because sometimes I like to have the full experience and am happy to zoom in or scroll around on smaller devices and it would be a shame if I as a user could not choose for myself.
 
What a nice suggestion. I would appreciate if this is suggested as a feature request in a separate thread.

I can't tell how much I wished something like this. We run Urdu forum which is a complex script langues and hugely based of ligatures. A particular style in Urdu typography mainly used in printed material is called Nastaleeq which does not expand horizontally when more characters are added in a single ligature, instead, it expands horizontally and vertically both in a slanted fashion. This nature forces the font designer to leave enough space above and below xhight so that generally used all glyphs fit nicely. This means that a 12px Nastaleeq font will be roughly as small as a 9px serif font. Our community members complained a lot about smaller font size on forum initially and we had to change the font size of every single field to make it look nicer. It was such a painful experience.

Along the same lines, I would appreciate if there is a hierarchy or major category of font-family sets (is there one already that I am not aware of?) so that if we want to style user generate content in one font, menu items in another we don't have to go to every single component on an atomic level. But if we prefer overwriting some specific components, we should be able to do that as well. I am referring to the same approach as it was taken for the colors. There are categories of colors and if those are changes, every component that inherits color property from there gets that change.
http://xenforo.com/community/threads/easier-font-size-styling.50928/
 
One complaint I had from users when I ran responsive was they wanted the ability to swap back to the full version of the site. Some people like visiting the full site on a mobile device for whatever reason.

Hoping we might have a per user option to disable responsive?
 
I was throwing in a quick list using my top devices in Analytics
http://xenforo.com/community/threads/responsive-design-master-map.50930/

The medium one seems unused unless you apply that to the landscape mode of the devices.

And so far the iPads would take the full version of the site, unless you make the wide one up to 1024. Was the intention for the IPads to see the full site ?
http://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/media-queries-for-standard-devices/

Depending on how they've written the media queries they could definitely have made it worked properly.
 
http://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/media-queries-for-standard-devices/

Depending on how they've written the media queries they could definitely have made it worked properly.
I usually optimize for iPhone landscape, portrait, and iPad. And the new phones have me throwing me off with their huge resolution (but small screen size)

That is only the showing / hiding of the elements and font resizing, though. I consider that trivial. The other topics I will be interested in is ...

  • The login experience is a little weird in mobile. Basically because you click on the "Register" button that appears on the sidebar (is it there anymore), and then the popup from the top of the screen slides in. This is slow on most devices, and a little weird since not all the content is visible on the screen. Also, "Yes my password is" is preselected, and you need to select "Create a new account", and selecting a radio button in a touch device is extremely annoying. My personal opinion is that page should just go straight to the registration page
  • The inline moderation is going to be a challenge. I think that will be one of the features that can shine on a responsive layout, or make one's life miserable.
  • I wonder whether on a mobile device, clicking on a profile should send you to the complete profile, instead of displaying an overlay. The overlay is slow to load on mobile, and looks weird. I guess after responsive it should be no bigger than the usual screen anyway.

All in-all when optimizing for mobile devices the basic philosophy should be: The site should be usable without me having to scroll or zoom in. That is the litmus test that I will do once we have some preview next month :)
 
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