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?

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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.

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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.

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It's great to see such good feedback for this feature. I'm personally really pleased with how it's come together.

This is going to be killer. The market has changed, surprisingly a good half of the comments I get from users were with them browsing from a mobile device. Mobile is turning to be really really relevant, and having a forum that works well when viewed on a smartphone is great.

Thanks for all the good work, I am sure we will find edges to polish but it is looking good
 
It's still hard to hit the 'go to last unread post' (little blue) icon on a mobile device. Dunno how it goes with small fingers :cautious:

Moving/Placing the cursor on iPhone seems to be buggy. Have sometimes to hit preview before I can move the cursor.
 
I know there are a few minor bugs with this responsive view, but overall it is very impressive! Quite a unique way to approach it, as opposed to going the route of detecting user agents and providing an alternate theme.

I posted about it on a couple of other forums and already users are glad to ditch Crapatalk and Forum Dumber in favor of a design that works without any plugins. Very excited!
 
Agree with @Rudy

Looking forward to deploying this release for the new editor and responsive design alone! Everything else is just a bonus.
 
The screenshot of the admin page is also something I've been posting elsewhere--it explains how the system works much better than I could ever attempt to.

Hey--it's also cool that I just resized my browser into a very skinny window, and the forum reformatted its view instantly. Nice!!
 
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