We’re pleased to announce that a our backend website facelift is ready for you to play with!
We’d love to hear your thoughts on the new design – email your feedback to support [at] www.appenate.com.
Let us know what you like and let us know if anything is broken for you!
Why Change The Design?
Our existing live platform backend has not changed substantially in terms of the overall look and feel for over 4 years.
Its a design that has served us really well, but over the years various limitations and accumulated patches have taken their toll.
We want to freshen the backend and provide a modern style with more “room to breathe” in the layout. The design is also more responsive in nature and lays the groundwork for a better fit across tablet and desktop device form factors in the future.
What Has Changed?
All backend web pages have been converted to use the well known Bootstrap 3 framework. We chose Bootstrap because its among the most widely used web frameworks, and has a wealth of supporting plugins along with solid cross-browser support.
Along with the move to Bootstrap, we have moved the key styling aspects of the platform to use LESS variables.
This means that it is now much easier to style and skin the platform with alternative colour schemes, fonts etc than it was in the past – this is a big win for our Website as a Service customers.
Do I Need To Do Anything?
If you are a Website as a Service customer then yes, you absolutely MUST update your styling settings.
Any old custom CSS you currently have in place will NOT work with the new design.
There is new LESS variable functionality to be found in the “Customise Site” page which you need to configure to match your branding colours and style.
Along with the LESS variable functionality is a new Preview function which lets you save changes and see these applied within the site for your user session. This preview has no effect on the live site so you can play as much as you like.
If you don’t have a branded website backend, then there is nothing for you to do as such – though we’d love to hear what you think of the new design!