Symphony.

You guys realise that the current Symphony theme already is responsive right?

Oh, haha, what a surprise!

Was this a 2.4 addition? Sure it didn't used to be :p

Even better then, that's one box ticked!

It's been responsive since Symphony 2.3, so May 2012. I use it often :)

How odd!

Most of my experience is with 2.3 - so I'm a bit baffled :p

Chalk it up to confusion with another CMS/Product I guess!

@Nils what are your thoughts on this direction?

@brendo how is it responsive? What happens to the Navbar on mobile/tablet views?

Certain things may scale and I'm not knocking anybody's work, but I would hardly call this responsive:

Tables need responsive treatment (there are some elegant solutions I have seen in the past), as well the header area overlay, site display name, UI elements, etc.

To be honest I don't care this much about how a basic theme look likes. I appreciate the work of the 'real' symphonists who make it possible that we can build awesome websites. The people who make the invisible part of the system, the engine which makes it works.

That Brendo was maybe to positive to say the theme is responsive I'm agreed, but in this kind of discussions we sometimes forget what effort and dedication some people make ... in their spare time.

@plenaforms I totally agree with you and I'm not knocking anyone's work at all. I think it is incredible that @brendo and others have contributed so much of their free time to make building awesome websites a possibility.

I also am wanting to dedicate time to make the admin interface better as I have clients that want a better responsive panel. The only reason I bring these things up are because I want to build a better admin panel that is built into the core that gives a better experience for people and allows developers to leverage my work in easily customizing the functionality and feel of the admin panel.

Whether you care or not is not the issue. Some developers care and I have paying clients that care and I want to give them an experience that is usable. I'm not talking about spiffy looks but something that holds up when editing entries on a mobile device which is totally broken right now, especially with lots of columns and section complexity.

I'm trying to go about this in the right way by soliditing core contributor feedback before I just blow away or dismiss their work. I'm not forgetting anything as there are long threads here and on GitHub issues related to the work I'm trying to do in the backend.

I appreciate the work of the 'real' symphonists who make it possible that we can build awesome websites.

This comment is both unhelpful and offensive. If you are suggesting I'm not a "real" symphonist because I don't contribute as much as they do, that is not fair. I have been helping test and diagnose issues with @Nils Association work in addition to offering feedback on migrating from SubsectionManager as well as helping to fix various UI glitches related to Symphony 2.5.0. I don't have the developer chops these guys do but I'm doing what I can with the skills I have and that should count for something as I want to give Symphony developers a great experience on all platforms to take advantage of all of the wonderful back-end development going on.

This comment is both unhelpful and offensive.

My comment wasn't meant to be offensive and surely not personal for you. We are all symphonist and we all contribute in our own way to the community. My apologies if my words were understood different.

Keep going with the good work

@jdsimcoe - I had a quick check when @brendo mentioned that it was already responsive and it looked OK to me, but you've rustled up a great example there, boy that screenshot has some issues! Maybe I'd seen something more like that that left me assuming it wasn't an intentionally responsive backend, and instead just utilising fluid widths relatively well, it would explain my confusion up-thread.

It definitely needs some big improvements.

Certain things may scale and I'm not knocking anybody's work, but I would hardly call this responsive

Agreed.

Ok, well lets do something about it. jensscherbl, jdsimcoe why don't you team up and work together to modify the styles to help improve the Publish Index? The tables do need some work, and they are a pretty standard UI across Symphony so the work here will go a long way. I've attended some meetings and remember this responsive tables link being discussed quite heavily.

I think the last example, "No More Tables" would probably work best for us. What do you think?

Here’s another and yet another interesting read regarding responsive tables (in german, sorry).

Tables are always a nightmare, but we tend to favour leaving them as they are and making them horizontally scrollable (i.e. so you can scrub them with your finger), as ultimately there's only so much you can do with tabular content on mobile. @brendo that option is very interesting, I'm struggling to envision it in a Symphony context, but I'd love to see it in action!

Responsive is a kind of 'being fluid' and in that way not always a synonym for mobile friendly or even better 'mobile usable'. An administration backend is not only about viewing content.

From UI thinking a better approach would be a search/filtering function (selectize as used in association UI could be a good option) and only show the entries you are looking for.

Pure responsive the most simple option was to give a td a display block and they will stack till android kitkat dropped support for td to render as block elements (at least to a width of 100% of the viewport).

nathanhorby, I'm imagining each row would become a card, with the column header on the left, and the content on the right. Instead of 15 rows, there would be 15 cards. If the content is larger than a row, it'd just break over two lines.

Interesting to know about KitKat changes. I assume that's with the default browser? Or Chrome? I thought Chrome replaced the default browser on KitKat, unless that was just for 'new' KitKat devices rather than upgrades.

@brendo It is with the default browser and can be different depending on manufacturer.

I wonder how many people do really manage their content on mobile. Or is it just for a quick change of a few words?

To make things easier I put always an edit link on the front-end so you can go directly to the entry. No table view needed.

  <h1>
    <xsl:value-of select="title" />
<!-- EDIT LINK -->
    <xsl:if test="$is-logged-in">
      <small class="edit">
        <a href="{$root}/symphony/publish/{../section/@handle}/edit/{@id}" target="edit">edit</a>
      </small>
    </xsl:if>
  </h1>

To make things easier I put always an edit link on the front-end so you can go directly to the entry. No table view needed.

That's exactly what I've done as well, and it's why I haven't noticed the table issues. I've just edited grammar, spelling, publish/unpublish and small updates to dates/prices on the mobile. Usually it's urgent stuff that can't wait until I'm in front of a laptop :)

Nice to know I'm not the only one making use of it!