Responsive – New Era For Your Social Site

After Responsive Clean  and Advanced Album Upgrade were released, many questions were sent to us. Their concerns are mainly about “What is responsive?”, “How to get my sites responsive?”, “What are the differences between mobile view and responsive?”, etc. Therefore, we write blog entry where you can get answers to these questions.

This blog entry focuses on:

• Differences between default Template and Responsive One
• How to get Full Features of Responsive: Template and Plug-ins
• Compatibility of SocialEngine default templates
• How to check whether sites and plugins are responsive
• Responsive and Mobile View
• YouNet Products: upgrade timeline

Non-responsive, SE Fluid Style and Fully Responsive 

• With the default of SocialEngine, your site display is fixed regardless of device screen size. In order to get cooler site display on Mobile, you have to switch to Mobile View with fairly limited functions.
• Fluid Style: the width of block/column may be different based on screen size, but style can’t be changed. Particularly on tablet or mobile, layout can’t be adjusted.
• Fully Responsive: layout adjustment is based on screen size. Display style is optimized for devices: Desktop, Tablet, Mobile and even more for different device sizes. Checking our demo using Responsive Clean.

How to get fully responsive

Firstly, it requires your site to use Responsive Template – you could check our Responsive Clean Template. With this one, any plug-in which is developed based on SocialEngine product standard will auto adjust its display for at least different styles: Desktop, Tablet, Mobile. Check out our demo for SocialEngine Poll, and SocialEngine Classified.

For particular plug-ins, they require special layouts or widgets, then they need upgrading to adjust layout reflective to Responsive. For example, our Advanced Plug-in Family: Advanced Album, Advanced Blog, Advanced Event, have just been upgraded, from now on, they are not only displayed perfectly on default SocialEngine templates but also support fully responsive – Visit our demo and experience yourself!

Compatibility with default SocialEngine templates

As we said above, plug-ins with responsive feature are perfectly compatible with default SocialEngine templates. Now we are using their demo at – http://socialengine4.demo.younetco.com/

How to check responsive features

Step 1: Resize screen size of your Internet Browser to size of Tablet and Mobile to see if the site itself supports responsive, then to go product details and repeat the previous steps.

Step 2:  Use any tablet or mobile phone to access and see if layout is automatically adjusted accordingly.

From our demo, you could see:

• Plug-ins are installed on default SocialEngine template – ex. http://socialengine4.demo.younetco.com/albums
• Plug-ins are installed on Responsive template – ex. http://se4templates.demo.younetco.com/responsive-clean/albums

For each product, you can find information related to:

• Detail information about product features
• Links to default template and responsive
• Screenshot tabs: default SE template and Responsive template

Then Mobile View?

Responsive Template does not overweight Mobile View, it is just another option.

• Mobile View: totally structured your site layout for Mobile View. Style and theme color might be very different from your full site. It brings your member experience as they are using Mobile Native Application but in Internet Browser. Cost of layout adjustment is quite high.
• Responsive Template: similar to full site but layout looks more attractive. It is optimized for a particular size of device screen. Style can be changed easily via template editor.

Both of them can support 3^rd party modules which require custom work. Cost of mobile view depends on how many features you want to be supported and designed. Cost of Responsive feature is mainly based on number of pages and testing. It is slightly lower than Mobile View.

Last but not least, we are working on upgrading our plug-ins to fully support Responsive. First release is Advanced Plugin Family, next is Social Plug-ins, Utility etc. , along with their further update as well.