Which is the best way to convert/change an existing drupal site to a responsive pattern? I have searched lot, but not getting any right direction or guideline. My current site is running with drupal 7 and zen theme. Do I need to change the theme to responsive one like bootstrap or there have any other better solution.
I think you got the answer in your question! I used the Bootstrap theme for Drupal to make my websites responsive. It works perfectly. You can find it here:
Bootstrap project for Drupal
The theme is shipped with sub-theme starter kit you can use to pimp your own theme safely.
You don't convert the Drupal site but the HTML output, to responsive.
How the HTMl is generated (the Drupal theme) is not relevant.
Regardless of what theme you are using, something that I found useful is just open your website in Chrome, and using Developer tools, I add media queries as required to a new CSS, fixing only what looks too cluttered or small in the simulated device.
Some steps include:
Add a new folder to workspace (Sources tab)
Add a local (initially empty) css link to the drupal header (to work with the actual site, or you'll have to take the task to generate an off-line version of your site, fixing all the links to point to your local computer, or to setup that theme in a local server, as MAMP)
replace all the WIDTHs from container that prevent the site to be reduced with the browser's viewport (as you reduce the window size) with MAX-WIDTHs (same value), and set a new WIDTH to 100%. Now your design will be flexible under the original width.
hide, float, or change the position of divs to flow nicer with the new viewport width.
A trick I use a lot with big marketing elements (not article content with lots of text) is to make them elastic, so they look always the same relatively to the viewport. To accomplish that: re-define font-sizes AND all dimensions in em. Then and add "font-size: 1vw;" to the first parent that can be proportional to the viewport's width or matches the full viewport, and when your viewport resizes, all the elements will scale as well.
setup a few classes as .mobile-hidden or .desktop-only to hide/show redundant elements in mobile view.
(Obvious) make texts bigger and add give enough padding to small elements to be easily touchable.
Then just upload your CSS to the theme and change the url in the link you created before in the header.
Voilá: responsive theme.
Note: Keep in mind many scripts these days modify the DOM and new elements might need to be styled later, once you run some cart, or functionality which generates/changes elements and their styles.
Good luck.
Related
I'm developing a WordPress website and have some trouble with the header width on some specific screens as you can see in the image below.
Does anybody know where I can adjust this in my template? (I guess it has something to do with the min-width.) To take a deeper look, the URL is www.brainfarts.shop.
I think this is an error with the media queries, I see the trouble when I change the width between 1,000px and 1,280px (both widths included).
I don't know much about Wordpress but if I were you I would try to mess with the site changing things with the element inspector of any browser and then try to apply the changes in some place in your Wordpress, in some section where you can insert your code (css).
I have been given a task to convert an already hosted website into responsive. My working knowledge on CSS is below average.
In that quest, I heard about media queries. I looked for a solution, but what I got was more confusion. Media Queries? I tried responsinator.com and checked my website in that. Actually I don't know how to know whether a website is responsive or not.
My website fits the mobile screens. Header and footer automatically adjusts themselves.
There is a big slider and it just got cropped, but still loads images and works fine. If my website is responsive, how come the slider get cropped?
To make a responsive CSS, Will I have to make any changes to the values in my already existing CSS? Or will I have to just add my styles (without any edits) into the media queries given below.
#media(max-width:480px){
/*PUT YOUR CLASSES STYLES HERE*/
}
your media query defines which part of your css to look in, think of it like an if statement.
When it falls within a media query in your css file, your css has be defined to cater for that screen size,
Just because your page objects crop when you make the screen smaller does not make your site responsive,
best take your phone or tablet and visit your site, if the user interface is simple, easy and smooth, then you dont have to worry, but if you have a desktop styled site on a phone as wide as your numpad on the keyboard, you have some work to do.
It's quite difficult from my experience to "convert" a static website into a responsive one, especially if you do not have good CSS knowledge. Try to find elements with a fixed width and make them fluid by experimenting with max-width and procentual width values. Hope this helps.
I'm using the Bootstrap framework for a web application. The responsive design works very well for the primary part of our site which needs to work on smaller screens. However, there's an admin section where the responsiveness is both not that necessary (will be administered on desktops) and gets in the way (the forms/tables require tweaking to work at smaller sizes).
Is there an easy, scalable way to turn off bootstrap responsiveness for certain pages?
Right now, we have a single bootstrap .css file with the #sizing elements included. I could separate out boostrap.css and bootstrap-responsive.css and then only call responsive on pages that need it. I presume that would work, but would mean yet another setting (it's a cakePHP app).
Ideally, I'd like to assign a class to the body or main container that would override the responsiveness -- <div class="container non-responsive">
One other note -- I'm really only concerned about the responsiveness below 1024px in this case. The way it expands in larger screen sizes works well in the admin section.
Separating them will be easier even though it's another setting. When you download Bootstrap from their home page (http://twitter.github.io/bootstrap/, instead of via their Customize page or via the GitHub project) it already separates the responsive styles into a separate file.
However, you can add your own styles that are more specific than each of the responsive styles in Bootstrap and override them. It could get hairy though because you'd basically have to repeat everything in bootstrap-responsive.css and override manually for each style property specified by Bootstrap's responsive file.
A better approach might be to edit bootstrap-responsive.css and prefix each style within the media query with ".responsive " and add the "responsive" class to the body element of the pages that you DO want to be responsive.
Hope this helps.
It's noticeable when using the "Hot Towel" SPA template with Durandal that the views sit in a middle window that's 1100 pixels in width rather than using all the available space.
And yet all the views within the applicationHost are set to use the Bootstrap from Twitter "fluid" styles. Effectively a hard-coded max-width set on the body tag is making all these fluid styles redundant and rather meaningless.
It's easy enough to over-ride the body style set in app.css (assumming there will be no side effects to setting it to a ridiculously high value) but I was just wondering if anybody knew the reason for setting it this way in the template, given that it's undoing all the good work of trying to implement a responsive design that all those Bootstrap "*-fluid"styles are trying to implement.
No particular reason. Feel free to remove it if the layout still appeals to you. You can submit a pull request on github for changes too, as HotTowel is open source.
I am a newby to design and looking now into the use of background instead of foreground images, which is a common practice.
I look at the techniques used, and see that:
you usually need to explicitly state the dimensions of the image (and set the foreground element to these dimensions)
you need to make the foreground element to somehow disappear with css tricks.
All this looks really hackish. So, I wonder, why on earth do all this instead of just using the native element? I am sure there is a good answer
(I did go through this When to use IMG vs. CSS background-image? , and could not figure out a clear answer)
One thing to consider as a benefit to using CSS for images is that you can load all your design images (images for UI elements, etc) with one http request rather than an http request for each individual image using a sprite. One large image that contains a grid of all your images.
As its been stated before, content images should use the img tag which also helps for people using various accessibility options when visiting your site/app. For example, if they are using a screenreader, the screenreader knows its an image and can read the img alt name or title, but if its just a div with a background image they get nothing.
The main difference is that in the img tag the image is hardcoded.
With CSS you can create different designs, switch between them, redesign the page, without altering the source code. To see the power of CSS, check http://www.csszengarden.com/, all the pages use the same HTML source, but with different CSS layout.
As #Shmiddty noted, if img is for embedded images (actual content, for example a gallery, or a picture for an article), and CSS is for design.
Also, the question you referred to, has nice list of all the use-cases: When to use CSS background-image.
The goal is to separate content from presentation. HTML should contain just content, and all presentation should be moved to the CSS. Once you achieve that, you gain a few useful side effects:
The CSS (presentational code) is cached by the user's browser, and each HTML file requested is smaller. This also has some SEO benefits (decreased code fluff).
Screen readers have to muddle through less when interpreting your page for visually impaired users. Making sure your HTML contains just content means visually impaired users reach what they're looking for much quicker.
CSS makes it possible to display the same content in different visual configurations, which is the cornerstone of the responsive web design movement. Properly delineating your content and presentation means being able to use the same HTML files across multiple platforms (desktop, tablet, smartphone).
However, there are times when images are content on a specific page. In those cases, you want to use an IMG tag, and moving the image to the CSS is actually a wrong move. A great discussion of when and where to use text to image replacement is at When to use IMG vs. CSS background-image? Basically, my personal litmus test is something like: Is this image going to be used multiple times on the site? If it is, it's probably part of the design. Once-off images are generally content.
If you're looking to move your design images to the CSS, congratulations :-p You've adopted a healthy amount of work, but started doing something worthwhile to the long-term health of your website as part of the web ecosystem. I would highly recommend looking into using the SASS/Compass system to manage your design images as sprites (see A List Apart:CSS Sprites and Spriting with Compass).
One of the main points of image replacement is to use your site title in a h1 tag for good SEO, and then hiding the text and replacing it with a custom logo.
This also makes your site more accessible. Say for example, your user has CSS disabled for whatever reason (screenreaders, maybe). They would still see the textual representation of your site title, whereas normal users would see the custom graphic.