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Release 9.0 of Telligent Community Server has made the following theme and theme management advances:
- Theme management for admins, owners, and users is supported from the front user interface.
- Dynamic previewing.
- Page editing is supported from the front user interface.
- Application creation is moved from the New button to the group Management panel.
- More readable fonts.
Goals of the Social theme
Telligent Community Server's Social theme follows these precepts:
- Modern, uncluttered appearance.
- Constant access to search and personal icons.
- Menus hidden when unneeded.
- Uniform experience across platforms.
- Contextually sensitive action buttons.
- Understand what options the user needs in the context.
- Assistive search that includes current context.
- Search finds results as you type.
- Technical advances.
Modern appearance
Community Server uses a layout with a three-column central block and (2) one-column side rails, which is conducive to different form factors.
The flat, easy-to-render design elements have a general absence of clutter, focusing on:
- One action per page.
- Easy-to-read fonts.
- Solid colors.
- Simple block buttons.
Constant access to search and personal icons
The theme header (including search) is constantly visible on a page, including when a user scrolls down.
Hidden menus are displayed when clicked
Slide-out menus stay hidden unless they are expressly selected. Extra menu items are layered under a New menu or a More menu. The options appear upon clicking the menus.
"New" menu expanded on group home page
"More" menu expanded on group home page
Responsive design
This design concept helps to create a uniform experience, regardless of form factor. Please see Responsive design for more information.
Contextually sensitive "New" and "More" options
With the Social theme, in each context - on the site home page, a group home page, inside a group, on an application home page, on a post page, or on the profile page - the options adjust to the current context. For example, the following screen captures display the More menu options available on the group and subgroup home pages:
"More" menu options from a group home page
"More" menu options from a subgroup home page
Search is always visible; results are always filtered
This theme is designed to keep a static header, which includes the search box, visible from any scrolled location on a page. Clickable search filters change depending upon context. For example:
- On the site home page, search defaults to searching content (that is all content), groups, and people.
- On a group home page, search filters results by the current group context, anywhere, content, and groups.
Technical advances
The Social theme makes use of many modern approaches to responsive design and provides platform support for implementing and customizing themes against multiple device sizes with a single implementation. Advances include:
- CSS3. The theme makes extensive use of CSS3 to provide visual effects enhancing the user experience and ease of customization. There are no images defined by the theme.
- Icon fonts. The Entypo font is used to provide all iconography within the theme. This both ensures that all devices get a high resolution version of each icon (including high DPI devices), but also makes recoloring/resizing existing iconography easier.
- Web fonts. Various web fonts are used to improve the readability of content within the theme.
- LESS-based stylesheets. All CSS within the theme makes use of the LESS superset of cascading stylesheets. LESS enables variable definitions that are used throughout the stylesheets to control color, spacing, and iconography. LESS also provides easier nesting of rules, decreasing the total bulk of the source stylesheets and simplifying customization. All syntax is resolved to standard CSS on the server side, preventing the need to process LESS adjustments to CSS on clients' browsers.
- REST batching. Community Server 9.0 includes support for batching REST requests. Widgets within the theme make use of this API to provide a faster user experience, especially when performing bulk actions.
- REST APIs. The theme makes use of APIs to improve the responsiveness of the UI, including Ajax-based resizing of media and physical image resizing.
- Javascript APIs. Many Javascript APIs are included, such as touch-related and resizing events, support for messaging to identify changes in scrollable screen height, and link list overflow logic.
- Starter Kits. Starter kits exist on the default site and group home pages and enable administrators to provide details about their community/group, enabling a meaningful context of applications and widgets.