2013-07-18

ADOTAS — Symphony is an open source content management system that is becoming increasingly popular today due to its versatility. One of the reasons for the popularity of the Symphony CMS is that this open-source system offers excellent support to the creation of responsive web design.

What is responsive web design or responsive website? Responsive web design is meant to provide ultimate user experience by delivering websites that are easy to read and navigate without any need to resize the pages, pan or scroll horizontally irrespective of the device that is being used. Today the challenges of designing a website are many because the users do not access the websites just with their desktop computers or their laptop computers. Users access the websites using variety of devices such as tablets with varied display sizes, smartphones and PDAs. Responsive web design makes the website adapt to the gadgets that are being used providing the optimum experience to the users.

You will be able to integrate your HTML5 responsive website to Symphony CMS. This is a very flexible platform that will work extremely well for all types of websites from desktop to mobile sites. One of the important features that makes Symphony CMS to be the most ideal CMS for your HTML5 responsive website is the special Screen Detection extension. The function of this extension is to trigger server-side optimizations that are required for responsive web design. The user’s browser window properties are added to the param pool. This ensures that all the media is optimized to suit the screen size and screen type. The screen detection extension works the best when it is used with the client-side JavaScript. Installation of this extension is very simple. You should add this folder to your extensions folder and you can enable this extension by visiting Extensions under System. The final step is to include the js/plugin.js to your scripts. This script will adjust the width of the window and the screen when the browser is resized. The size of the browser is saved on to six cookies including window width,  pixel density,  screen width, screen height,  window height  and pixel density. All the subsequent pages are resized before the pages are displayed. Using this technique, you will be able to deliver fully optimized media to your users based on their screen properties.

With more and more people accessing the Internet using their smartphones, tablets and other connected devices, every website designed should be well prepared to meet the changing trends. Symphony uses open source standards including XML, XSLT, XHTML and CSS. The best part about Symphony CMS is that you are not required to learn an entirely new framework. Above all, Symphony CMS being an open-source platform, it is totally free, and users will receive excellent support.

Though Symphony CMS is relatively new, it addresses the need of the hour most efficiently.

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