The Unicode Consortium Discussion Forum

I find I do more and more email by phone, which works quite well. My nexus has a screen resolution of 800x480, which is larger than PC screen resolutions used to be. Yet that is not big enough to really use the forums effectively, given the layout.

That wouldn't be bad for PC screens either, since if a window is small enough you can leave it up on the screen over in a corner.

So I'd recommend changing the layout so as to work better on smaller screens.

We use a "canned" style for the board. It's difficult and time-consuming to write a new style setup. However, the good news is that there are dozens of styles to choose from that other people have already made for PHPBB. They have a styles demo:
http://www.phpbb.com/styles/demo/3.0/
You could try looking through those and see if any are more suitable for use on mobile devices. For example, they do have a sort of "minimalist" style that has no colors, icons, etc.
http://www.phpbb.com/styles/demo/3.0/?style_id=95
We could add a style to the board and then turn on the option that allows users to choose one of 2 or 3 styles.

However, there are problems and caveats. First, every time we touch anything in the style setup to add features or modifications, that would have to be done for each style because a lot of functionality is embedded in these. It's not rocket science, but isn't trivial either.

I have already made local mods to the current Red style to add functionality that we need, such as Smartfeed. The modification packages usually only come pre-rolled for one or two board styles. For other styles, it would mean figuring out and making all of the modifications required to add the functionality. Again, not trivial, because the styles are complicated bundles of code/data/stylesheets.

For testing, I downloaded and installed the Minimal board style, so you can try it if you want and see how it behaves with smaller window sizes. Go to "User Control Panel" (located near the top of the page in the regular red board style). Go to "Board preferences" under the Options list on the left. Look for "My board style" and set the pull-down list to "Minimal" instead of "RedSilver3". The Minimal board style is (a) about as uncluttered as they come, and (b) has some of the options and links in different places, so you may have to get used to it.

Once you're in the Minimal style if you get lost, look for "Profile" at the top of the page and that will take you back to the User Control Panel where you can set "Board preferences" again.

If you want to use the Minimal style on your phone but not elsewhere, you might try to sign up with a different account just for your phone, then set the option to auto-login when you visit the forum. That way you should automatically get the Minimal style on your phone. (Note: if signing up for different accounts, you will need to use different e-mail addresses.)

If people really want to be able to read this forum on their phones, might we want to install one of the plugins that lets them use software designed for phones, like Tapatalk or TouchBB?

FWIW, the special style isn't showing up on my iPhone.

I don't think that has been an design criterion for any of this. People are just making observations. I pointed to a "minimal" style that you could try on your phone, to see if that is easier in such an environment.



I don't understand what that means. Special style?

Well, Tseng, this morning I installed Tapatalk on this forum, so let me know if it works for you. :geek:

By "special style," I meant the Minimal style, but I hadn't set it up properly. It's definitely an improvement, but on the iPhone at least it's still a little too small to read without zooming.

Unicode isn't showing up when I search for it in Tapatalk, but when I log in via Safari, I'm told it's available in Tapatalk. Did everything go OK when we submitted our information to Tapatalk after it got installed?

I did not submit our info to Tapatalk, because the forum is not live for the public yet.

Reasonable enough. It may be possible to set things up so that only people who are looking specifically for the Unicode forum can find it. But I'll see if I can find out how to get to a forum inside Tapatalk armed with just its URL.