Responsive Design Themes?

[FirstDivision]

I've been evaluating Gold for a while and can't seem to find any information on this. Are there themes available that are responsive ready?

From what I can see, all the default themes use tables in quite a few places. This would make incorporating responsive design (more) difficult.

If not, is the alternative to re-write the ascx controls that use tables into ones that do not?

Edit: I did discover the mobile master page which I hadn't seen yet, but it would be nice to be able to go "truly" responsive which would mean only using one master page and not have to reply on user agent detection (which is how I'm guessing it knows to load the mobile master page?).

[mazhar]

In gold we cleaned the HTML and now mostly its DIV based hence I belive you will be able to customize one of the standard themes easily. If there is some table in user control then you will have to edit the ascx file and update it accordingly. Regarding mobile master page yes you are right its working against mobile device detection and all mobile store pages are under /mobile directory. Mobile store really had different view which I am not sure can be mixed with standard store. There is an option to disable the mobile store through admin so if you really want to use single version of website for normal and mobile devices you can disable the mobile store and then create a theme following responsive design gidelines for standard store.

[jmestep]

The mobile store pages are not as "heavy" with html and data, which is good, because you don't want to pass a whole chunk of content to a mobile device and eat up usage on someone's data plan on a mobile device.

[FirstDivision]

Thank you for the responses so far. I'm learning a lot, but I have a ways to go I'm sure..

...create a theme following responsive design gidelines for standard store.

Which, if I understand correctly, would require modifying any base user-controls that the design-side team says "this needs to change before we can make it responsive", as well as the stylesheets, etc?

I guess we'll see what the design-side says, but my guess is that a control like ConLib/ProductTellAFriend.ascx is one that I have a feeling I might be asked to rewrite without tables. This, in turn would require editing Product.Master to use the "new" control, right?

I feel like that might be getting into "you don't want to do that if you ever want to upgrade to new versions of Able in the future" territory.

Can a custom theme have its own master pages and controls so that it does not interfere with the base-installed able master pages/controls?

[jmestep]

If you want to go completely table-less, you are going to need to change some of the pages like CategoryGridPage.ascx. It uses a .net <asp:DataList control and that emits the content in tables. You would have to change to a page that uses a <asp:Repeater and put your own html in. CategoryListPage.ascx uses a Repeater.

[mazhar]

Can a custom theme have its own master pages and controls so that it does not interfere with the base-installed able master pages/controls?

You can't have theme specific master pages and user controls. What you can do is to create your custom controls in a sub-folder in ConLib. For example ConLib/MyControls. You can simply use these controls when specifying display-page/layout for your page(s).

You do not need to modify existing default master pages. Master pages are 'Layouts' in AbleCommerce. Just go to Website->Layouts menu and add new layouts. You can copy from the existing layouts and proceed also. The layout you specify is for a page is the layout that gets applied. However please not that there are some limitations when handling master pages (layouts) from merchant admin. If you have custom hand-coded master pages, it is better not to edit them in the AC merchant admin because you can loose your custom changes.

[compunerdy]

That is a big design flaw in my opinion. I had to modify a lot of files to get a liquid layout and with one trip to the layout menus in Admin I can accidently wipe out all of my code changes.

[jcw2m]

In this case I have to agree with some of the other posters. Able is a very powerful tool and I can understand the data concerns. That said, it would be amazing to see Bootstrap, HTML5 Boilerplate or something similar in place. I did notice that a viewport rule was incorporated with a few other tools this time - a step in the right direction.

I just finished rough implementing a home page requiring a full screen image gallery as a background. In a different framework I probably could have accomplished that in half the time. Customers are growing much more savvy as far as industry trends. The first inquiries I got were for various device screen sizes. Unfortunately it would take much more time than I have to create all the media queries needed to support the customer's requests in the current structure.

[efficiondave]

If you want to go completely table-less, you are going to need to change some of the pages like CategoryGridPage.ascx. It uses a .net <asp:DataList control and that emits the content in tables. You would have to change to a page that uses a <asp:Repeater and put your own html in. CategoryListPage.ascx uses a Repeater.

As of ASP.NET 4, you can make an asp:DataList output content to DIVs instead of tables by setting the following: RepeatLayout="Flow" RepeatDirection="Horizontal"