TOPIC:

Per the August Leader letter, we have now released our revised template for use by all club and district FreeToastHost websites.

This is not an optional update. Some of the changes were requested by Toastmasters World Headquarters to make the template branding keep pace with current needs. Additionally, much of the Toastmasters promotional content has been updated.

Places to look for the updated promotional content:
1. If creating a new website, the default home page content is updated.

2. The home page accordion panels have been updated with new TM promotional content, including a video.

3. The linked Toastmasters video in the menu has been updated.

Additionally, I took advantage of this update to make some structural changes to the template. Specifically, you should find that the revised template works a bit better on devices with smaller screens, such as mobile phones. This is my *initial take* on a responsive layout--more responsive features / support will be added in the future.

Specific details about this:
4. On smaller screens, the left side navigation column is hidden, and a menu icon is shown at the upper left to access the navigation column.

5. Many of the dialogs have been updated to adjust their width for the screen width.

6. Not everything is intended to be usable on smaller screens in this initial effort. Specifically:

__a. The Admin Console is not designed to be responsive in this update... You still will need to work in the admin console on a desktop computer for best results. The various tables used the Admin Console are the main culprit... I have not yet put in the time to come up with a way to show them on small screens.

__b. The dated Agenda module is not designed to be responsive in this update... You still will need to work on a desktop computer when editing agendas.

__c. Given #b above, there is a *new feature* I added for quickly signing up for meeting roles (Quick Role Sign-up) that is designed for smaller screens (like phones) . Additionally, this new feature is "bookmarkable"--you can set a bookmark to it on your mobile phone browser for quick access.

__d. Most member content (e.g. Member Profile) should work on smaller screens. I may need to make a few styling adjustments here and there, but they should work.

__e. Website background "wallpaper" images are disabled on smaller screens. They are not really viewable on smaller screens, don't really add anything useful there, and they can actually slow down website loading on mobile.

__f. Many websites will need their content adjusted to make it responsive--this is another case of just because our website template has some responsive features does not mean we adjust your content to be responsive, also. I have started a separate topic thread for that, and I will discuss ways to do that there. I hope to create a new Web Page Tool in the near future to help with that.

Relevant screen shots follow...

1241 - Communicator Club - Dawn (again).

Thank you for the updated message. I was just inquiring about this today.

Our site: communicator.toastmastersclubs.org/

Seems to have some of the changes but not all. Our background is gone, the left tabs don't appear. The accordion on the home page seems to not be there.

Am I jumping the gun?

icypetals wrote:

1241 - Communicator Club - Dawn (again).

Thank you for the updated message. I was just inquiring about this today.

Our site: communicator.toastmastersclubs.org/

Seems to have some of the changes but not all. Our background is gone, the left tabs don't appear. The accordion on the home page seems to not be there.

Am I jumping the gun?

You need to check your website Appearance Settings. You do not have tabbed menu set as your menu style, you do not have a background color set, you do not have a background image set, and your Toastmasters Accordion content is set to be hidden.

Change your settings if you want something different to show.

Wonderful! Thank you, Steve.

Carmen

Worked awesome. Thanks for the information.

Club 3963

Hi Steve,

Thanks for all your hard work.

Will we be getting Club Website Color Theme options at some point. The new default is kind of a downer.

John

The Blue is the club colour theme as instructed by Toastmasters International Marketing.

I made a couple of small CSS changes to make sure the system level FTH layout is preserved even with content that does not scale for smaller screens. Wide, un-scaled content will now cause a horizontal scroll bar to show near the bottom of the screen on smaller width screens... this is your cue that you have some content that needs to reviewed to make it responsive.