The Joomla!^® User Experience Portal

I agree with Seth - most benefit lies in being platform/browser agnostic.
Thanks for all your good works on this, everyone.
I am quite excited to even see this 'ux' space here.
Dex

Are there currently any core outputs that are not device agnostic? None spring to mind for me. The only thing I can see that may be an issue for dumb devices is the use of modals for settings. It would be interesting to see how they degrade.

As long as we are outputing clean, lean markup appropriate templating can make things work on any device.

Maybe I will start work on a mobile first admin template @Kyle do have anything public on Github?

Totally agree with Duke. One very important aspect I believe will be the ability to override. While responsive design and mobile templates can be created by designers it doesn't always end up the way we would like compared to a version for a larger screen.

For instance if you have a graphic on a page that is very large that wouldn't look correct re-sized the ability to override is key. To allow a override is easier for a user that doesn't have the skill set for responsive design as well.

Another smaller example is some sites don't use a component on the homepage and are displaying everything with modules then a mobile template will display nothing initially. this can be overcome by modules within the mobile template but again its more work than an override would be.

This is one of the biggest problems we have run into when we have been creating mobile templates for Joomla sites. The second being more robust menu options and styles.

Is there anything in the works for a separate default mobile template or is the UX team looking to roll it in the default template.

My team and I would be happy to play a role or help lead with mobile template creation for the project.

As for overriding, I think one of the best options would be to have options in the menu items themselves as to select a different article or whatever the menu item type is for the mobile devices. For instance, the current setup for the menu is to create your menu item, select it's item type (lets say single article), and then select the article you want.

A great way to solve this problem of having different content for the mobile browsers is to have two different select boxes for the articles. One article would be for the desktop and one would be for the mobile browser. Developers could do this in their menu items as well by serving up different menu item types for their component. Just for example using the single article menu type, you could have another menu type that's called "Desktop and Mobile Single Article" or something like that where you can specify two different articles. Here is an image of what I'm talking about:



Most of the time just using media queries and styling with CSS will work but pages that are specifically styled for the desktop would have to have a separate way like this to serve different content for the smaller screen.

Another alternative would be a derivative of the language system in 1.7 where you can associate mobile content to desktop content.

@gswahhab @alex2savvy

I don't think we are all talking about the same thing here. Both of you seem to be talking about the front-end. It is my understanding that we are talking about Joomla! as a whole, not just limiting ourselves to front-end content delivery.

Even if that were the case, what you seem to be proposing is the complete opposite of what would seem to be the most logical approach; the segregation of content delivery based on some arbitrary notion of mobile vs. desktop users. To my mind, such approaches are out-dated and ill-conceived at best, lunacy at worst.

I would love to hear of any good example where an appropriate template could not be used to serve the content in an optimal fashion. There isn't a single example I can think if that would require the sort of segregated, dual-content approach being proposed here. Personally, I don't even see any good arguments for the use of 'mobile' templates.

Let's just suppose for a minute that this was considered a good approach, there are several funademental questions that we would have to ask ourselves in trying to implement it:

1) What is a mobile device and what is a desktop device?

Is my iPad (768px x 1024px) a mobile device? What about my 1024px X 600px Netbook? There are no black and whites, but many shades of grey here.

2) How are you going to detect 'mobile' devices?

In try to answer the question above, we can see that screen size isn't going to cut it. Device detection? Fundamentally flawed an unmaintainable. How many devices do you have to try and detect today? It isn't just phones and computers, you need to consider TVs, games consoles, fridges (it's true!). How many will you be attempting to detect in 2years time? 5years?

Browser detection? Even less reliable. History teaches us that user agent detection is not only unreliable, but liable to abuse. There is no way to differentiate, based on user agent from the Mobile version of Opera used on my Nintendo DS to the one my Wii uses to show content on my 1920px TV. It also suffers from the same issue of maintainabiity. Who is going to contstantly update these detection scripts?

There's a reason the giants of the web are dropping such methods as quickly as they possibly can; they have discovered the high cost of attempting to maintain what is essentially unmaintainable.

If Google, YouTube, eBay, Amazon, et al. have decided they cannot afford to continue like this we should take that as a clear sigh that this is not the way we should be doing things.

We already have a tried and tested method for overriding and modifying the delivery of content, templates. Front and back-end, they work like a charm.

To my mind, all we really need to do is ensure that everything output by the core works on dumb devices, a lowest common denominator approach. Progressive enhancement takes care of the rest.