New Admin Look

[Ted]

I know we've been talking on and off about this new admin, so since sjg just did a kick butt theme for it, I figured I'd post a pic and give a little taste of where we're going with it.  There is still a lot to be done, but it's coming together.


[attachment deleted by admin]

[seliger]

Maybe I don't have access after just signing up, but any attempts to grab the screenshot results in:

"It seems that you are not allowed to download or view attachments on this board."

Any ideas?

[Ted]

Sorry about that.  Permissions have been fixed.

[100rk]

Hi Wishy,
new admin: nice work! ))

I am using little hack in /admin/listcontent.php (line 124) - dropdown list for fast access to edit form is usable for me.

Code: Select all

if ($modifyall)
{
	echo '<p><form action="editcontent.php" method="post">';
	echo '<select name="content_id" onchange="this.form.submit();">';
	echo '<option value="-1">'.lang("editcontent").'</option>';
	foreach ($allcontent as $one)
	{
		if ($one->Type() != 'separator')
		{
			echo '<option value="'.$one->Id().'"';
			echo '>'.$one->Hierarchy().'. - '.$one->Name().'</option>';
		}
	}
	echo "</select>\n";
	echo "</form></p>\n";
}

[sjg]

I just threw that new logo in as a placeholder, since I couldn't scale the existing one in a way that looked good. If you could design a logo that fits in that space, it'd be great!

It's a coconut palm, though! Really!

(From my window right now, I can see four or five species of palm tree. I should be able to get a good picture if I need one.)

[sjg]

In the new admin, modules can park themselves in the category that makes the most sense. So "Content" may end up having lots of different items in it (Pages, HTML Blobs, News, Bookmarks, etc). But also we wanted quick access to the pages, since that's one of the most common places an admin will go.

That's my explanation, anyway

[amh]

My english is very bad, but I'll try to write my ideas:

Please group all the items logical! Content are the Webpages and pictures. Why are html blobs in the content-area? Perhaps the moduls can have a form for imput. An author only use one section to update the webpage. Now the author must go to content management, news, ...

Then a section for Site Development template, css, blobs, snippets ... A section for extensions is great, but think if you are only update your website. Many Extensions and no overview. Preferences for modules and plugIns and imput in the Contet-Area? Is that possible?

Usability is very important!

my recommendation for sorting:

content
  content management (pages,)
  files
  imputs for modules
  ...

development
  html-blobs
  css
  template
  ...

extensions
  moduls
  tags
  ...

preferences
  site admin
  site preferences
  admin log
  user preferences
  ...

view site

log out

[tamlyn]

Love the new look admin in beta2. It's very clean and professional - much more so than the 0.9x admin screen. Good work all!

I do kinda agree with amh though about the organisation of the subsections - although they seem perfectly sensible to me I can see that many users could be a bit confused.

The trouble is we developers tend to take a developer view and organise things how they are coded rather than a user view who only cares about how things are used (to a user 'news' is a kind of content). The main problem I find is that this makes the code messier and tends to break things like encapsulation and reusability that we have always been told are Good Things(tm). In the end it's a trade-off. But then what isn't...

[tamlyn]

Heh, just logged back into my site and noticed you already have changed them around. Double good work

[tamlyn]

OK after working with the admin section a bit longer I have a few more comments:

excellent work on the tabbed panes (basic/advanced) for content editting.

In Firefox on Windows 2000 the text in input/select boxes and buttons is unreadably small. Same goes for footer text and the basic/advanced tabs text on edit content pages (but not the recent/bookmarks tab text). Don't know if this is a font issue with my computer or what - other websites seem ok. The strange thing is that if I change the following rule:

Code: Select all

.AdminForm,
.AdminForm input,
.AdminForm select {
	font-size: 80%;
}

to 100% it actually fixes the basic/advanced header text as well as the input/select boxes and buttons even though I can't see any connection between the two rules. I'll try it on linux and see what it's like there.

At window widths of less than 1030 (or when a sidebar is displayed in the browser) the recent/bookmarks tab obstructs the wide edit boxes such as edit content and edit template. This is not much of a problem for me as it simply  means I have to close my sidebar but for someone with a lower resolution display it would be *highly* irritating. Maybe the javascript could check the window width and if lower than a certain size it could 'roll up' the recent/bookmarks tab so that they are only shown when clicked on.

Similarly at window widths of less than about 950 the top menu wraps around. This isn't a problem in itself but it then obstructs the content at the top of the page (usually just a header). Not a huge usability issue but does look a bit funny.

OOPS! I've just discovered the preferences section where the bookmarks/recent tabs can be switched off and the menu can be put on the left with the monochrome theme. The first issue discussed only occurrs in the default admin theme, not bluewater or monochrome.

On the group permissions page it might be neater to have the perms arranged in three columns for add, modify & remove.

It would be good to have a tooltip on the [+] menu link explaining that this adds the current page to the bookmarks.

When logging out of the admin the page says "Logging out. Redirecting to login page..." but the page title says "Logging in... please wait" (changing this is probably more hassle than it's worth)

Question:  Is there any way to hide the 'extensions' menu item? I tend to only give site owners the minimum of permissions on their CMS accounts partly to protect them from themselves but also to hide unnecessary complexity.

Well that's all for now! Overall I still really love the new admin layout.

[SRTech]

Yes, I have the same problem with the font sizes. Can't quite get the code tamlyn posted to work yet, but it does need to be fixed.

[sjg]

Just wanted to give everyone an update on this stuff...

I'll be updating the admin and theme code further tonight.

I've already rolled in some of the changes, along with some of the taxonomy changes suggested by amh above.

I plan to make sure that all of the themes work correctly in 800x600.

Also, WiseQ had some suggestions about the how the default system works, which I'll try to add in as well. The default theme will be renamed, and if you select "default" you will get the admin theme that was set in the "Site Preferences" page.

I'm still having an inexplicable problem with the tabbed box in IE using the default theme. I don't understand why it works in bluewater but not in default. But I'm working on it...

Keep the feedback coming!

Thanks,
___Samuel___

[Greg]

My .02 cents on this topic.

I think HTML Blobs should be under Content as that is how most of my users use them. A spot for specific content on a page, such as mini news or Attention: Notice: etc.

Also I notice line 49 in header.php is still in need of fixing for IE scrollbars in svn.

[sjg]

My .02 cents on this topic.

I think HTML Blobs should be under Content as that is how most of my users use them. A spot for specific content on a page, such as mini news or Attention: Notice: etc.

Also I notice line 49 in header.php is still in need of fixing for IE scrollbars in svn.

I've just completed a reorganization of the admin theme directory structures. I think everything is working.

Actually, if you look at header.php, it's calling style.php, which then grabs the stylesheet for the current theme. The ?ie=1 in line 49 tells style.php to also use "style_ie.css".

Now it should look in admin/themes/$themename/css for style.css (and also include style_ie.css for Explorer).

Let me know if this isn't working correctly. The weird IE style loading thing is something I found recommended on CSS sites, but I only have limited access to IE, so I haven't been able to test to my satisfaction.

Thanks,
___Samuel___

[Greg]

With the ?ie=1 in line 49 there are no scrollbars when using IE, so no way to scroll down on pages with more content.

If you view source it shows as ?ie=1

If I change the line to style_ie in header.php it then works.