Newbie Q re: Responsive/Mobile Display

Just now reviewed this mobile tutorial, from which the following text has been excerpted:

"The default theme uses a small amount of responsive design so that pages look good on both tablets and desktops. Otherwise, mobile mode is the way mobile pages are served in the default theme."

(1) I thought this meant my newly installed site, with the default theme, would resize when I adjusted the browser window, but that is not the case. Instead, the site seems to be displaying in a fixed width, and I'm not sure what I'm missing here….

(2) In addition, am I correct in understanding that the default theme will automatically display in mobile mode on mobile devices?

(3) Also, are there any other responsive and/or mobile themes from which we can choose?

Any help or clarification will be genuinely appreciated.

With my thanks in advance,
Metta

Hi,
 

1. You can turn off "Fixed-width" in Admin Zone -> Setup -> Configuration -> Theme options
2. I believe so (although this may be v11 so not 100% sure).
3. Themes - Composr has the currently available v10 themes.

Thank you, Adam, for your prompt and helpful feedback.

I am aware of the option to turn off the fixed width setting. (Thank you, though, for the reminder.)

What I do not understand is this statement:
"The default theme uses a small amount of responsive design so that pages look good on both tablets and desktops."

I did not observe any responsive behavior with the default theme, and do not understand which elements of the default theme are supposed to be "responsive" to changes in the screen size.

Any additional clarification on this specific question will be appreciated.

In the meantime, I will take a look at the other theme options.

Adam said

2. I believe so (although this may be v11 so not 100% sure).

Good to know this autoresponsiveness may be coming soon, if it is not already available.

Has  any information be provided about the estimated timeline for releasing v11?
 

Just now turned OFF the fixed width on my site, and I've tested the display in 2 different browsers (Opera and Chrome), but it looks like this display change did not take.

Any recommendations/suggestions?

I am not sure what that sentence means exactly either, I would assume the responsiveness is in the default mobile template though. Hopefully Chris or one of the devs can answer in more detail. v11 has no ETA (a current GitLab zip will install but I don't think it has the hybrid_responsive branch merged into it yet) as there is still much to be done and client work is prioritised.

Thanks, Adam. Appreciate your prompt and conscientious follow-up again.

Understand completely the need to prioritize client work.

You're welcome As for suggestions, did you empty the template cache? HTML_HEAD.tpl (where the mobile/desktop code exists) is included in GLOBAL_HTML_WRAP.tpl and this means changes will not automatically be reflected without emptying the cache. Tools > Website cleanup tools in Admin Zone.

@Adam ~ I have not done anything with the Template Cache. (Had no idea it existed or that it would impact the display of web site changes.)

Am I correct in understanding from your suggestion that any (every) time I make web site display changes this cache will need to be manually emptied?

The very small amount of responsive design in v10's default theme is when fixed width is on. For a tablet it should fill the full width and not show any edge styling.

That's all I'd refer to as responsive design really. When fixed width is off it will use fluid design, i.e. we don't set the size of everything, it will stretch to whatever the browser size is. When accessing via mobile mode it will use some different layout rules so it is fluid but for smaller screens.

The fixed width setting should take instantly (I'll test that when I finish what I'm currently working on). If it doesn't though, Admin Zone > Tools > Website cleanup Tools is where you can empty the template cache.

I'm not going to claim the v10 default theme is good. The assumption always was that people would want to implement their own custom designs (using it as a base, but editing it a lot), with whatever modern techniques were appropriate to their audience.

That said, when we do finally get v11 done (and this has been taking way longer than expected for various reasons), the default theme is going to be really good, because we're changing the assumption. For v11 we are working on the assumption that most people will not have the time/skills/experience to be doing heavy changes to the default theme, because web technology has progressed a long way since 'Composr v1' and there is a lot more to it than there was in the past, and because people don't tend to release themes for Composr due to how personal each individual layout is (given the different assortments of features different users choose).
Instead we are going to be (1) providing a lot of different options for tweaking how it looks (2) have some defaults that can expose all of Composr's content out of the box in an attractive way regardless of what combinations of content people choose ("tiles") (3) the default theme will be a lot more attractive because we won't be intentional keeping it to a subset of the styling people might want to do anymore.

@Adam - hybrid_responsive has actually been merged.

@Chris ~

Thank you so very much for your thoughtful, thorough and helpful feedback! I'm impressed and grateful for your time and help.

Glad to know that turning OFF the fixed width should display automatically ~ and I'm delighted to learn more about where things are headed with your new assumptions for the version 11 theme! Since I am one of the people to whom you referred (who has neither the time nor the experience to make a lot of deep theme customizations), I will be looking forward to see what options will be available for tweaking the new v11 theme.

In the meantime, I'm not exactly sure what the last line of your message meant:
> "hybrid_responsive has actually been merged"

Am I missing something here?


 

hybrid_responsive is the branch on GitLab which contains the work done on the new v11 theme responsiveness. I wasn't sure it had been merged in the main v11 development branch yet, but Chris just confirmed that it has

Great! Thanks for confirming, Adam. Appreciate your prompt follow-up and clarification.