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History: Navbar improvement ideas

Source of version: 3

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            Bootstrap has a mobile-first philosophy, so things are built to be usable on small devices first and then scaled up/modified to work well on larger displays. 

Tiki comes from the other direction, made for pc displays. The legacy site header carries that baggage.

Goal: Have a useful and attractive site header/navbar that adapts well to all screen sizes, and is as flexible as possible in accommodating content of the site.

Approaches:
* Use Bootstrap code (or equivalent) as closely as possible.
** It'll scale naturally for all displays (plus).
** This limits large-display content - how to have banner ads, non-menu/search/login content, etc.(minus).
* Use legacy Tiki site header modules, etc.
** This displays fine in medium (maybe) and large screens.
** This is almost unusable in small displays as the site header take up the whole screen.
* Coping strategies
** Use Bootstrap visibility classes to display modules appropriately for each screen size ([http://getbootstrap.com/css/#responsive-utilities-classes]). 
*** Mostly this is to hide non-responsive modules in small views (plus).
*** This means extra work at the admin-modules stage, and it's not documented yet (minus).
** Take advantage of the pagetop module zone to place a small-device menu that's hidden in larger views (currently in use at themes.to.o).
*** Provides an escape from what could be a mess in the collapsed site header.
*** This means making a duplicate menu and adding it in admin-menus.
** ??
* Next steps
** Make navbar with "super-module fluffy" custom module
*** Should produce the desired collapsible header (plus).
*** Why is a profile/custom module needed to provide a basic feature? (minus)
** Should alternative menu display ideas be introduced (slidebars -[http://plugins.adchsm.me/slidebars/], etc.)?
** Is there a way to revise the code to get both a proper collapsing menu in small screens and the legacy site header contents/appearance in desktop view?

Possible path:
Is there a way to have, in module admin, a "navbar" module. This would be a type of "fluffy/super-module" with the special quality of having two parts: a navbar-header and a navbar-collapse section. This would implement the standard Bootstrap navbar construction. But in the Tiki way the contents would be configurable. The admin could choose what goes in the navbar-header section (site logo, site title, text, icon, etc.) and what goes in the navbar-collapse section (menu, search form, login form, non-menu link(s), text, notification icons, etc.). The element id would be set automatically. Maybe this would be a two step process in which the navbar module would be created and saved first, then its sections would appear as module zones, to receive their contents.

        

History

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Information Version
Wed 08 of Jul, 2015 05:48 GMT-0000 Gary Cunningham-Lee Some ideas added about module zone/module visibility. 4
Mon 06 of Jul, 2015 13:32 GMT-0000 Gary Cunningham-Lee 3
Mon 06 of Jul, 2015 10:18 GMT-0000 Gary Cunningham-Lee Added some links. 2
Mon 06 of Jul, 2015 08:23 GMT-0000 Gary Cunningham-Lee 1