Responsive Administration Panel
in progress
Aurélien Georget
Our plan is to make the Admin Panel work well on small screens and mobile phones.
1️⃣ Navigation & Layout
We plan to update the main menu to work better on mobile. It will open as a side drawer that's easy to reach without taking up too much space.
We also plan to improve the sub-menu. On small screens, complex menus can be hard to use. We'll make the sub-menu mobile-friendly while keeping it organized and easy to navigate.
2️⃣ Editing Content (Edit View)
Most of our work will focus on making the Edit View work on mobile, since this is where people spend most of their time.
We plan to redesign the header to fit narrow screens. Important buttons and information will stay visible and won't get cut off. Forms will stack neatly on small screens. We'll adjust spacing, improve field layouts, and make sure everything works well with touch controls.
3️⃣ Content History
The Content History header will work on mobile. You'll be able to easily read information and use controls. History actions and details will move into mobile-friendly drawers. This will keep things consistent and easy to use.
We'll make sure history comparisons and data display properly on small screens without breaking the layout or requiring horizontal scrolling.
4️⃣ List View Improvements
We plan to redesign filters to work better on mobile. Instead of showing everything at once, filters will open in drawers or pop-ups. You'll still get all the filtering options, just organized better for small screens.
5️⃣ Rich Content & Complex Fields
The rich text editor will work reliably on mobile devices. The toolbar will be easy to access, typing will be smooth, and everything will work well with touch.
Components and dynamic zones can be tricky on small screens. We'll make sure you can still rearrange and edit structured content easily on mobile, not just on desktop.
6️⃣ Text & Visual Design
We plan to improve how text looks on small screens. This will include adjusting font sizes, spacing, and layouts to make everything easy to read without feeling cramped.
Marco Autiero
I'm excited to share some updates on the Strapi responsive administration panel initiative! Over the past few weeks, we've been working hard to make the admin panel easier to use on smaller devices, especially focusing on navigation, content management lists, and edit views. I've attached a video that shows a side-by-side comparison of the user experience and interface before and after our latest improvements, it's worth a look! Check them out on v5.36. We're nearing the end of the core part of the initiative, and we welcome your feedback!
Marco Autiero
I'm excited to share some updates on the Strapi responsive administration panel initiative! Over the past few weeks, we've been working hard to make the admin panel easier to use on smaller devices, especially focusing on navigation, content management lists, and edit views. I've attached a video that shows a side-by-side comparison of the user experience and interface before and after our latest improvements, it's worth a look! Check them out on v5.36. We're nearing the end of the core part of the initiative, and we welcome your feedback!
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Vld Dmbr
Marco Autiero, amazing news! :) Thank you!
Marco Autiero
Vld Dmbr Yes, it's definitely been a long time 🙂 Believe me, it's frustrating for us when we have to set aside certain features and enhancement requests, even simple ones like this, to focus on priorities others. However, we're here now, better late than never 😃
Dipak Raghuwansi
Marco Autiero this looks nice! looking forward!
Kai Doe
We’re excited to share that we’ve adapted the navigation bar to provide a smoother, more intuitive experience on smaller screens.
We’re just getting started, so please bear with us - the team will continue to iterate in the coming months, bringing responsiveness to the Content Manager, Homepage, and other key sections of Strapi.
Stay tuned as we roll out these updates step by step, making Strapi more accessible and user-friendly wherever you are.
Niklas Winkels
marked this post as
in progress
We’ve heard your feedback, and we’re excited to share that we’re partially addressing this request by starting with
Responsive Fields & Components
. This means we’re making key UI elements adaptive to different screen sizes as a first step toward improving mobile usability.Our goal is to ensure that fundamental interactions—like editing content—become more accessible on smaller screens. While this won’t make the entire admin panel fully responsive yet, it lays the groundwork for a better mobile experience moving forward.
We’ll keep you updated as we make progress. Thanks for your input and patience!
Aurélien Georget
We are making significant progress on making the components of the Content Manager responsive. The entire interface won't be responsive, but the foundations for a full responsive administration panel are setup now!
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 🙏
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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!
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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.
Dipak Raghuwansi
Aurélien Georget but we also have to consider that not all million users are actively participating in this feedback forum. Currently I am using strapi as a backend for a Indian conglomerate and not being able to use the backend on the go is forcing us to not use strapi for our use case and use a 3rd party service. happy to share more details in a 1:1 setting. I was hoping it woul dbe fixed in v5 but the standard demo of v5 is also appearing to unusable on the go. As a basic quick fix, even if the second column is made collapsible, it will help.
Aurélien Georget
Dipak Raghuwansi Hey Dipak, I posted a new pinned comment, we have made progress on the design system to make most of the components responsive. We now have the foundations setup to start making the entire administration panel responsive. However, it still isn't identified as a top priority. I'll keep you posted once I have more details.
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
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