Responsive Administration Panel
planned
Aurélien Georget
For both marketers and developers, it could be very useful to have the ability to contribute content from their tablet and mobile. To do that, the user interface needs to be responsive and adaptive to every device sizes.
Aurélien Georget
Hey everyone 👋
It's Aurélien from Strapi, we started a few initiatives, mostly on our design system, to start making some components responsive. We would like to work on this next year, we might do a big push in Q3 (July - September), but I can't confirm yet, however, it's being discussed, we heard you on this.
✌️
D
Domi
hey guys, i have written a plugin that allows you to use the content manager on mobile devices at least a little bit better. you can find it here: https://github.com/DigitalMoonrise-UG/strapi-5-plugin-responsive-backend
Danil
It's 2024, you can run Blender on Nokia 95, most of websites and apps is mobile-first.
Meanwhile Strapi:
"Let's do refactor it to v5, but don't do mobile support lol"
Aurélien Georget
Danil How is this message productive?
To provide some context, the number of users accessing Strapi on mobile is relatively low. While the lack of responsiveness may play a part, it’s not the only reason—many users simply prefer managing their website content from a desktop. Even though 628 upvotes is significant, in the context of our millions of users, mobile responsiveness hasn’t emerged as a top priority in our regular conversations and interviews with users.
That said, we truly want to improve the experience for mobile users. However, making Strapi fully responsive involves more than just a few tweaks. It requires updating our entire design system to ensure all components work seamlessly on mobile. Since the same system is used by Strapi Cloud, this adds another layer of complexity. Strapi also relies heavily on modals, which further complicates the task of delivering a smooth mobile experience. Additionally, we’ve achieved an AA accessibility rating, and we want to ensure we maintain that standard on mobile, which means we need to be extra thoughtful in our approach.
This project is challenging, but we’re committed to it. You should start seeing improvements in the coming months, particularly as the Preview feature requires us to have a fully responsive design system.
Nick Nijenhuis
Aurélien Georget There might be a very good reason why the number of users accessing strapi on mobile is very low ;). I truly hope for you guys, that when this feature is done, you see the numbers go up and see it was worth it all along :)
However, I don't agree with you that you need to make the entire admin work flawlessly and fully responsive on mobile. You just have to make sure that the most used thing that users want to do on mobile, works. Which is why I would start with making the content editable on mobile. It should be fairly easy to start with a small thing and extend later.
You could even give the users the option to switch to the desktop view for other things that are not yet converted. Seems like a good idea to break this into small pieces instead of waiting until everything in the admin panel is fully responsive.
Danil
Aurélien Georget it wasn't meant to be productive.
Same as current state of mobile UI mwahaha.
Okay, seriously, I don't think anyone actually cares about perfect experience on mobile.
Hard to imagine someone been using data modelling feature from their phone or anything else.
Just simple ability to edit entries on phone is more than enough. Just 2 pages that supports mobile devices at least, just two. No, we're on the great mission to deliver AAA UI with ray tracing and cuda gpu support lol, that's why you can't perform the most basic operation that cms provides.
Your decision making logic is great. The most upvoted issue is not the most important one because nobody opens broken mobile UI on their mobile devices, so you making a conclusion that nobody needs it. Can't believe I'm having this conversation. So what your millions of users are voting for, then?
Aurélien Georget
Nick Nijenhuis Yes, we thought the same, we would like to focus on the Content Manager first because the only use case identified (yet) would be to let the users update their content. I don't think it would make sense to update the API, generate an API Token from a mobile.
Maybe we are wrong. However, most of our competitors except Sanity aren't responsive either. While this isn't an excuse, it means there are other product and engineering teams that never identified this as a priority. At least, it could create a differentiator :)
Aurélien Georget
Danil It's true that we might have a lower number of mobile users due to the poor experience, but it's important to note that we can't draw that conclusion definitively either. None of our competitors, except for Sanity, offers a mobile-responsive experience. There may also be other factors at play (low usage?). A fact that could interest you: 80% of the users don't write their content in the CMS UI; they use Google Docs, Notion, or other software because they have custom workflows and work with translation or marketing agencies to write it for them. In other words, 80% of the users copy/paste or import their content.
We don't base our decisions solely on the number of upvotes. While user feedback is helpful, we also engage in discussions with users, run surveys, and though the lack of mobile responsiveness has been mentioned occasionally, it hasn’t been identified as a top priority until now.
As for the strategy moving forward, it would align with what you mentioned—focusing on the Content Manager's list and edit views. It might seem straightforward, but again, if it were an easy win, we would have addressed it earlier. These pages interact with many features, including Draft & Publish, Review Workflows, Internationalization, Media Library, Releases, RBAC, Custom Layouts, and more. It means, we have to ensure the experience is smooth with all of these on mobile as well.
To answer your last question, the recent top priorities have been content versioning, preview functionality, TypeScript support, and improving overall stability by fixing bugs.
While I'm not trying to convince you, I am doing my best to explain that what might seem obvious to you may feel different from our perspective, and I understand your surprise at having this discussion. What I can assure you is that our team is made up of talented and dedicated individuals who are committed to building the best possible product for all of our users. If mobile responsiveness had been a top priority, we would have addressed it by now.
Nick Nijenhuis
Aurélien Georget In that sense maybe a seperate (web)app/page can help you achieve things sooner? Even if it was only possible to update the basic fields and not all the complex stuff, that would already be great.
I remember using the wordpress app for simple updates on the go a lot back in the day. Correcting a typo, and that sorts of things.
Aurélien Georget
Nick Nijenhuis This is a good idea, a simpler version could make the job done until we make the original app fully responsive. Thank you for the suggestion 🙏
A
ARBI JRID
is it so hard to make the pannel responsive !, come on , strapi we are loosig our business because of this outdated layout ! make it priority pls
Aurélien Georget
ARBI JRID Please read the message above. Moreover, Strapi is open-source and free, feel free to contribute and help us, it would be much appreciated!
C
Cory Watilo
Not to beat a dead horse but when I'm trying to do work on a 14" MacBook Pro screen with two windows open side by side (like when copy/pasting data into Strapi), the admin is essentially unusable. Making the menu hide and the sidebar collapse feels like low enough effort/high enough impact (hello, 600+ votes!) for this to get prioritized. =]
Aurélien Georget
Cory Watilo Please review my previous messages. While 600 votes may seem like a lot, in the context of millions of users, it's relatively small. That said, we are committed to improving the situation, and you can expect to see changes in the near future.
Engineer Sparic
My suggestion is, as I mentioned in one of the comments, is layout shift, in a way that main navigation (Content-Manager, Content-Type Builder, Media library, settings, plugins and etc.) goes top, like one top bar which could host navigation icons. Idea is something like NextCloud layout. On mobile resolutions top bar can be scrollable (some kind of:
overflow-x: scroll
) That way we have middle area for content of any kind. And it's simpler for content users to understand where and what to manage. In my review It seams that this is not that big complication, but, of course I do not know what this change brings to you guys. In any case love Strapi project. And thank you very much for your work!Kuba Raźny
still nothing?
Jason
I’m quite happy with Strapi for an app I’m building but this is a deal breaker - I don’t want to have to create my own editing experience because the bundled one doesn’t work on mobile. I agree with the comment below that a simplified content editor that works on mobile would be 100% sufficient.
Nick Nijenhuis
Still no progress on this?
May I suggest to just give us a link to strapiurl.com/admin/content where we can manage content only? The rest is not that important. This is a real blocker.
Justin van Dyk
The only thing that needs to be done is put the two left columns in a drawer menu. The rest of it is pretty usable.
Aurélien Georget
Hey everyone 👋
It's Aurélien from Strapi, we started a few initiatives, mostly on our design system, to start making some components responsive. We would like to work on this next year, we might do a big push in Q3 (July - September), but I can't confirm yet, however, it's being discussed, we heard you on this.
✌️
Tyler Hallnet
Aurélien Georget: amazing!!! This is great news!
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