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History: Sidecolumn toggle button experimenting

Source of version: 7

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            One of the interface changes in Tiki 25 was putting giving button classes to each of the anchor elements that contain a side column toggle icon. This was done to make the interface elements more consistent in appearance. Specifically, on wiki pages, the wikiaction dropdown icon (a vertical ellipsis icon) has a .btn-info class, and the page's edit, history, rename, etc. buttons also have Bootstrap button classes.

Also, especially on large screens, the isolated side column toggle icons, being just an icon without a surrounding button background, etc., can be quite small. So for these reasons the button classes were added. However, there was some feedback that now they look too chunky and intrusive. This discussion is the reason for this page, which will show some different arrangements of the side column toggle buttons to compare and maybe get a consensus on future versions.

All of these examples are from fairly fresh Tiki installations, master or branch 25, and no page-top margin has been added via the ((CSS Variables in Tiki|CSS variable)). 


!! Current situation (Tiki 25.0)
The buttons in this version are in the locations they've been in for many (all?) Tiki versions: above the side columns and near the page's side margins (or content container's side margins in the case of a fixed-with layout).

{img type="fileId" fileId="381" height="auto" width="100%" stylebox="border" alt="Image of side column toggle buttons"}


!! Buttons moved to top of main content column (#col1)
The idea here is to emulate the position and behavior of buttons controlling the visibility of -+aside+- elements, such as shown on [https://bootsnipp.com/snippets/Q0dAX]. In this case, the buttons are alongside the side columns, not above it, and move as the side column moves, or appear to as the side column displays or has a display:none property.

In terms of code modification, this is quite a simple change.

{img type="fileId" fileId="380" height="auto" width="100%" stylebox="border" alt="Image of side column toggle buttons"}


!! For comparison, icons without button container
This shows the buttons in the same position as in the previous example but this time the button classes have been removed so just the "bare" icon displays.

{img type="fileId" fileId="379" height="auto" width="100%" stylebox="border" alt="Image of side column toggle buttons"}


!! New try: chevron icon and btn-secondary
Part of the problem with the legacy appearance of the toggle icon (a left- or right-pointing triangle inside surrounded by a border) is, IMO {sign user="chibaguy" datetime="2023-02-15T13:40:26+00:00"}, the border kind of makes the icon look like a button, but it's a different sort of button than the others that Tiki uses, which are implementations of Bootstrap buttons. So this new try uses a simpler icon design -- the chevron -- that doesn't have a border. Instead it uses the Bootstrap button border. The -+btn-secondary+- class, or whatever is most discrete, could be used. 

{img type="fileId" fileId="382" height="auto" width="100%" stylebox="border" alt="Image of side column toggle buttons"}

The buttons can be moved slightly closer to the side columns. In this test, spacing wasn't optimized to do that, yet.




        

History

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Information Version
Thu 16 of Feb, 2023 10:20 GMT-0000 Gary Cunningham-Lee Use the correct image id. 9
Thu 16 of Feb, 2023 10:19 GMT-0000 Gary Cunningham-Lee Added one more image and explanatory text. 8
Wed 15 of Feb, 2023 13:48 GMT-0000 Gary Cunningham-Lee Added extra space before each heading for better separation. 7
Wed 15 of Feb, 2023 13:47 GMT-0000 Gary Cunningham-Lee Added note about spacing. 6
Wed 15 of Feb, 2023 13:40 GMT-0000 Gary Cunningham-Lee More text and an image added. 5
Wed 15 of Feb, 2023 12:18 GMT-0000 Gary Cunningham-Lee Added border around each image (stylebox="border"). 4
Wed 15 of Feb, 2023 12:15 GMT-0000 Gary Cunningham-Lee More text and images added. 3
Wed 15 of Feb, 2023 12:03 GMT-0000 Gary Cunningham-Lee Image added. 2
Wed 15 of Feb, 2023 11:49 GMT-0000 Gary Cunningham-Lee Page created and first content added. 1