4:35 p.m.
I have been a bit quiet on this, I guess I need to communicate more on
the lists. There has been a bunch of work done on the mobile front and
we are getting close to be in a state to do a push to get this into
gatein master. There are still a bunch of issues we are currently fixing
and it will have a lot of limitations. I will create another email
thread to discuss the separate mobile site (which has been mostly
separated out into its own extension).
There are some things we would like to get changed in the current gatein
code base to make it work better with the new mobile site and to work
with mobile devices better in general. Things which currently don't work
well and we would like to modify:
1) the login.jsp page (shared between all the sites) needs to be written
to be mobile friendly. Villiam has already done this and should probably
be able to do a PR for this.
2) popups and modals. These currently don't work on mobile devices since
we have js to reposition the popup on a scroll event, and mobile devices
automatically scroll when entering forms to reposition the keyboard.
These both fight against each other and the forms are constantly being
hidden behind the keyboard. Having the js reposition also has latency
issues. I would like to remove the js positioning and position this
purely in css.
3) using hover with menu elements doesn't work nicely on mobile devices.
We would like to change the portlets in the shared menu so that this
works better on mobile devices. For example, clicking 'site' would
toggle a menu with the site names and a 'edit site' element. Clicking
'site' would no longer take you to the portal navigation page.
4) change some of the layout of the shared layout portlets and combine
the features of the banner portlet (ie login/register/language).
Basically just clean this up a bit and make it more consistent to where
things are done. The other option for this would be to remove the shared
layout for a particular site, but I don't know how much effort this
would entail (for the separate mobile site we have, we just set the css
for the shared layout to hidden and do everything in a header portlet).
5) mobile sites need to configure the viewport of a page, which is set
by a meta tag in the header. Any objections to add a viewport properly
to a sites settings or properties? This would just be a string property
that an admin could set. Or does anyone have an idea on how to add this
in a better manner or a more general option for adding things to the head?
6) adding javascript to a particular portal/site. For mobile sites you
usually can add a small sniplet of javacode to scroll the page to the
top when loaded (to scroll past the browser url bar and buttons). For
this I guess the best way is to use the resource manager and use the
portal scope
There has also been some suggestions to make some mobile friendly
enhancements to the classic site. These would be fairly simple changes,
and not something we would want to spend a lot of time on.
- a flexible (non-fixed-width) classic skin. Essentially the current
skin but where the width for UIWorkingWorkspace is set to its max-width
instead.
- a flexible container. This container would switch from a column layout
to a row layout depending on the current width of the container (note:
obviously only works if the site is not fixed width). This would just be
something simple to use with the non-fixed-width classic skin and would
be really useful for the mobile site.
Sorry for the long email. Any thoughts or objections to the proposed
changes?
Thanks,
Matt Wringe