[Trac-dev] Responsive User Interface for Trac

[Jawad Ahmed]

Based on https://trac.edgewall.org/ticket/11953

Trac currently has an interface that provides a good experience when viewed
through a desktop browser. However, the experience is not so good on mobile
and tablets. Trac would benefit from a responsive design that improved its
presentation on all devices.

Twitter Bootstrap is world famous and widely adopted responsive UI
framework.
http://getbootstrap.com/

Logical Technology can contribute few UI engineers to convert Trac's
current UI into Bootstrap 4 responsive UI.

[h***@gmail.com]

A revisiting of the CSS situation would not only be worthwhile in light of
the many Genshi templates needing reworked with the migration to jinja2, it
would also be good to go through and setup some proper variables in place
for things like color palates that can propagate throughout the site. I'm
in the midst of assembling a Trac instance at work just now, and adjusting
it to match our company style guide involved repeating a lot of separate
individual color value changes. There are also cases in the current setup
where you'll see something like ticket.css overriding the colors from
style.css & trac.css on some of its elements, but not all of them, leading
to incoherently mixed color schemes.

Similarly, as I've been getting our suite of plugins put together, they
often have their own CSS for their templates that replicate elements of the
default Trac look rather than inheriting it from the style.css,trac.css, or
similar style sheets present in the core trac instance, such that another
round of scrutiny to do things like replace
certain-instances-of-white-but-not-all-of-them have to be done for each
plugin.

A more coherent inheritance approach would make the whole thing both more
maintainable and more easily extensible. They are supposed to be cascading,
after all.

I've got a couple of projects coming up this spring that will involve
Bootstrap, and would relish the chance to get to know it better. If you
folks at Logical want to start a Bootstrap-implementing branch, I'd be
happy to join in as well. If it's something that could be merged back in
time for 1.4, it could make the many plugin maintainers needing to update
their templates work that much easier.

-- Jonathan Laufersweiler

St. Louis, MO

Post by Jawad Ahmed
Based on https://trac.edgewall.org/ticket/11953
Trac currently has an interface that provides a good experience when
viewed through a desktop browser. However, the experience is not so good on
mobile and tablets. Trac would benefit from a responsive design that
improved its presentation on all devices.
Twitter Bootstrap is world famous and widely adopted responsive UI
framework.
http://getbootstrap.com/
Logical Technology can contribute few UI engineers to convert Trac's
current UI into Bootstrap 4 responsive UI.

[RjOllos]

Post by h***@gmail.com
A revisiting of the CSS situation would not only be worthwhile in light of
the many Genshi templates needing reworked with the migration to jinja2, it
would also be good to go through and setup some proper variables in place
for things like color palates that can propagate throughout the site. I'm
in the midst of assembling a Trac instance at work just now, and adjusting
it to match our company style guide involved repeating a lot of separate
individual color value changes. There are also cases in the current setup
where you'll see something like ticket.css overriding the colors from
style.css & trac.css on some of its elements, but not all of them, leading
to incoherently mixed color schemes.
Similarly, as I've been getting our suite of plugins put together, they
often have their own CSS for their templates that replicate elements of the
default Trac look rather than inheriting it from the style.css,trac.css, or
similar style sheets present in the core trac instance, such that another
round of scrutiny to do things like replace
certain-instances-of-white-but-not-all-of-them have to be done for each
plugin.
A more coherent inheritance approach would make the whole thing both more
maintainable and more easily extensible. They are supposed to be cascading,
after all.
I've got a couple of projects coming up this spring that will involve
Bootstrap, and would relish the chance to get to know it better. If you
folks at Logical want to start a Bootstrap-implementing branch, I'd be
happy to join in as well. If it's something that could be merged back in
time for 1.4, it could make the many plugin maintainers needing to update
their templates work that much easier.
-- Jonathan Laufersweiler
St. Louis, MO

Just to repeat here what was said in #11953, rather than creating a branch
you'll be better off writing a theme for Trac. If you find things along the
way that we can do to improve the experience of adding a them, please let
us know.
https://trac.edgewall.org/wiki/TracInterfaceCustomization
https://trac-hacks.org/wiki/ThemeEnginePlugin

Trac 1.4 is pretty much finished up, but there are some issues that could
be addressed for Trac 1.6, even if we don't go so far as to introduce an
entirely new theme and/or JS framework. We'd want to look at the tradeoffs
of using different frameworks. I've been interested in Vue.js, but haven't
spent time with it.

- Ryan

[h***@gmail.com]

Post by RjOllos
Just to repeat here what was said in #11953, rather than creating a branch
you'll be better off writing a theme for Trac. ...

Thanks for pointing us toward those resources. I hadn't considered the
theming plug-ins previously, as I hadn't envisioned the look & branding
aspects as something I would need to change very often once they're set up.
I can see where defining some instance wide variables and then passing them
to theme class instances could address some of what I'm struggling with
though.

Trac 1.4 is pretty much finished up...

Post by RjOllos
- Ryan

I'm happy to hear this, but also somewhat confused. Looking at open
tickets, dates, etc. for nex-dev1.3.x and 1.4 milestones, the impression I
got was of a project that has a lot of outstanding work to do before
hitting those milestones, and many decisions about things like multiple
projects still to be made. I'm happy to have been mistaken about that, and
am grateful for the work folks have done to get within striking distance of
a new stable reference release.

Would would you perhaps be willing to give an update on which of the many
tickets & proposals that have been floated are "IN" for the 1.4 release
(and thus a high-priority for attention) and which are being put aside for
future consideration? The most recent post to this group about it suggested
1.3.3 was to close last August with 1.4 release candidates to follow
thereafter. I'm not saying this to be critical about missing dates, this is
a community-project after all. Rather, I wan't to get a handle on which of
the many different pieces of the puzzle are most relevant going forward.

Thank you very much,
--Jonathan Laufersweiler

[RjOllos]

Post by h***@gmail.com

Post by RjOllos
Just to repeat here what was said in #11953, rather than creating a
branch you'll be better off writing a theme for Trac. ...

Thanks for pointing us toward those resources. I hadn't considered the
theming plug-ins previously, as I hadn't envisioned the look & branding
aspects as something I would need to change very often once they're set up.
I can see where defining some instance wide variables and then passing them
to theme class instances could address some of what I'm struggling with
though.
Trac 1.4 is pretty much finished up...

Post by RjOllos
- Ryan

I'm happy to hear this, but also somewhat confused. Looking at open
tickets, dates, etc. for nex-dev1.3.x and 1.4 milestones, the impression I
got was of a project that has a lot of outstanding work to do before
hitting those milestones, and many decisions about things like multiple
projects still to be made. I'm happy to have been mistaken about that, and
am grateful for the work folks have done to get within striking distance of
a new stable reference release.

The tickets in next-dev-1.3.x are unscheduled and probably won't be
completed for 1.4. The milestone will be renamed next-dev-1.5.x at that
time.

Post by h***@gmail.com
Would would you perhaps be willing to give an update on which of the many
tickets & proposals that have been floated are "IN" for the 1.4 release
(and thus a high-priority for attention) and which are being put aside for
future consideration? The most recent post to this group about it suggested
1.3.3 was to close last August with 1.4 release candidates to follow
thereafter. I'm not saying this to be critical about missing dates, this is
a community-project after all. Rather, I wan't to get a handle on which of
the many different pieces of the puzzle are most relevant going forward.

The tickets in 1.3.3 and 1.4 will likely get resolved for the respective
releases. I haven't had much time the past 3 months to move forward with
the release.

We've discussed adding a preprocessor like Less or Sass, and it seems
worthwhile. There is some discussion in #10672 about adding a preprocessor.
I've been wanting to move that ticket to completion. If that's something
you'd like to work on, we'd welcome the contribution.
https://trac.edgewall.org/ticket/10672

If there a refactorings of the CSS on the trunk that can help with
implementing themes, we'd also welcome those contributions. You can fork
the project on GitHub and propose changes (though we don't directly merge
pull requests, we can merge from your forked branch). Please be sure to
make your changes atomic for review and to ease rebasing.
https://trac.edgewall.org/wiki/TracDev/SubmittingPatches#MultipleChangesets

- Ryan

[Cauly Kan]

Hi there,

I'm writing a plugin recently to implement a app-like mobile display, which
is available here: https://trac-hacks.org/wiki/TracMobilePlugin

In my point of view, responsive framework requires lots of efforts in
refactoring and debugging, and not achieving the best effect: you know, the
concept of designing UI is different on PC and mobile, as PC is good at
displaying tables, while mobile is good at display lists, etc.

By the way: writing a vuejs based mobile app is surprisingly easy,
TracMobilePlugin is supporting nearly all main features of trac except
milestones and source repo, in only one week: faster than I ever excepted,
as I'm actually a starter in vuejs.

Post by RjOllos

Post by h***@gmail.com

Post by RjOllos
Just to repeat here what was said in #11953, rather than creating a
branch you'll be better off writing a theme for Trac. ...

Thanks for pointing us toward those resources. I hadn't considered the
theming plug-ins previously, as I hadn't envisioned the look & branding
aspects as something I would need to change very often once they're set up.
I can see where defining some instance wide variables and then passing them
to theme class instances could address some of what I'm struggling with
though.
Trac 1.4 is pretty much finished up...

Post by RjOllos
- Ryan

I'm happy to hear this, but also somewhat confused. Looking at open
tickets, dates, etc. for nex-dev1.3.x and 1.4 milestones, the impression I
got was of a project that has a lot of outstanding work to do before
hitting those milestones, and many decisions about things like multiple
projects still to be made. I'm happy to have been mistaken about that, and
am grateful for the work folks have done to get within striking distance of
a new stable reference release.

The tickets in next-dev-1.3.x are unscheduled and probably won't be
completed for 1.4. The milestone will be renamed next-dev-1.5.x at that
time.

Post by h***@gmail.com
Would would you perhaps be willing to give an update on which of the many
tickets & proposals that have been floated are "IN" for the 1.4 release
(and thus a high-priority for attention) and which are being put aside for
future consideration? The most recent post to this group about it suggested
1.3.3 was to close last August with 1.4 release candidates to follow
thereafter. I'm not saying this to be critical about missing dates, this is
a community-project after all. Rather, I wan't to get a handle on which of
the many different pieces of the puzzle are most relevant going forward.

The tickets in 1.3.3 and 1.4 will likely get resolved for the respective
releases. I haven't had much time the past 3 months to move forward with
the release.
We've discussed adding a preprocessor like Less or Sass, and it seems
worthwhile. There is some discussion in #10672 about adding a preprocessor.
I've been wanting to move that ticket to completion. If that's something
you'd like to work on, we'd welcome the contribution.
https://trac.edgewall.org/ticket/10672
If there a refactorings of the CSS on the trunk that can help with
implementing themes, we'd also welcome those contributions. You can fork
the project on GitHub and propose changes (though we don't directly merge
pull requests, we can merge from your forked branch). Please be sure to
make your changes atomic for review and to ease rebasing.
https://trac.edgewall.org/wiki/TracDev/SubmittingPatches#MultipleChangesets
- Ryan