(WAS Re: Any good responsive, modern themes?)

[Gwenwyfar]

Looks a little better than before.

A few quick notes: The boardindex and messageindex look iffy, there's no point in all that empty whitespace squeezing the text (and it doesn't need to be so large). Same in topics, and other places are actually the other way around: Things are too glued together.

It's a sad thing that many sites score so low in those tests, but close to 100 is above average. Responsive tests also mostly just check if nothing breaks, in the way a computer can recognize it, so pretty much it checks if nothing overflows and if there are no elements that are too small. Basically it can check if it was made to be responsive or not, and little else, it's hardly any measure of quality. If there are 'responsive' themes that can't get a good score on this, well...

[drewactual]

thank you.

yup- that's precisely what i mean about machines instead of human eyes- metrics used don't equate to ease of human interaction with the page. 

I'll get on the whitespce issue.... thank you, once more.

[njtweb]

HOLY CRAP! De-rail city. Wow was that some powerful ****** reading through there.

Anyway, I appreciate everybody's work here and I fall into the category where nothing is easy, no matter what anybody says. I look at coding similar to the tv show "Extreme Engineering". I wonder how the **** did somebody one day decide screwing this together, and welding that in conjunction with placing hand made parts on will achieve XYZ goal? I see coding the same way. I can write very simple HTML that I gleaned off of snippets all over the internet but I can't for the life of me figure out how the hell anybody comes up with these scripts and makes them function with so many different working parts.

Crazy, anyway, thanks to all for everything you do. I think its so very cool when I need a fix and somebody knows exactly what it is. Even when I describe it with zero technological foundation, to the point where what I'm explaining doesn't even make sense to me.

[Bloc]

Interesting topic.

I know the (derailed) discussion have more or less cooled down - which is good - just thought I put a couple of points in there: CSS is simple enough(relatively speaking) but SMF is a large project with many templates and different kind of designs throughout the different parts (adding to it whole new functions through mods and their own templates) so it IS quite an ordeal to make a fairly responsive theme for it. At least SMF2.0, 2.1 is a little better in that respect.

One other thing I'd like to point out is that creating a good theme isn't just about being fluent in CSS.. In fact, if you are less than comfortable in working with the pure visual side of it, its going to be hard. Even for those that are, it will take time to tweak something quite right. Of course, your mileage may vary as to what is good enough but I for one is a bit of stickler to details around this.

The solution are perhaps good foundation themes - thats how most started out anyway, building on another theme(default mostly). Trouble is..there aren't many other than default theme itself that are *that* highly tuned, both code and visually speaking. There should be more of them but for various reasons its not.

[Antechinus]

You're not still thinking about SMF themes, are you? That way lies madness.

[Mick.]

You're not still thinking about SMF themes, are you? That way lies madness.

lol

[Looking]

Interesting read. I'll just say that making a site mobile is a lot of hard work and most importantly it is ONGOING. You may address an issue today and find that some user somewhere may have trouble with it and then you have to address the issue again. A lot of planning has to go into a multi-function theme because you have to decide what is the most important for a mobile user to see / access and yet not take away from a desktop user. In other words, its more than pretty colors and things that slide and fade away.

[Bloc]

Interesting read. I'll just say that making a site mobile is a lot of hard work and most importantly it is ONGOING. You may address an issue today and find that some user somewhere may have trouble with it and then you have to address the issue again. A lot of planning has to go into a multi-function theme because you have to decide what is the most important for a mobile user to see / access and yet not take away from a desktop user. In other words, its more than pretty colors and things that slide and fade away.

Definitely something will have to be hidden/transformed etc. The whole decision making of that will set the tone for a whole theme, so its not like you can easily re-use it in another - at least if you plan to write different html for the next theme.

That said..using CSS grid's template areas I believe will ease this bit somewhat.

[Sir Osis of Liver]

You always have the option of using two themes, with mobile theme being displayed only on mobile devices.  There's a mod that does this, it's outdated (2012) and doesn't work well out-of-box, but can be upgraded with third party code, and configured to select which devices see which code.  Been tinkering with it for couple of weeks, have it set up so desktops, laptops, tablets see main theme, phones see mobile theme.  It's a bit squirrelly, the mobile detect code probably requires constant updates, but good thing is main theme is not affected, and you still have a large choice of non-responsive themes.  Still a wip, but I have it running here.

[Antechinus]

I like a little bit of responsive even on a desktop theme, just so things stay tidy even if you're temporarily using a small window for it. Only has to be clean down to about 800px wide though, which usually easy just by dropping a couple of redundant boxes that are really only there to fill up space on a large screen.