Well I have made a ton of progress today in the rewrite. Everything I have done thus far is all completely CSS based, so it will be very, very easy to modify the look and feel at a later date. As a matter of fact, maybe I can convince one of you devs to slap together a color selector in the configuration section similar to what vBulletin or IPB have in their admin panel?
I’ve dumped the three panel look in an effort to clean up the UI substantially. The first thing to go was the "Box O’ Options" in the top left. I’’m currently toying with two designs for menu navigation...which may both be included in the final release: One is textual driven CSS/Javascript (unfortunately I was digging through the code and realized that this was already an option for people that use a browser called IE...whoever uses THAT old dinosaur anymore!), the other will be icon driven and FUN...though I’m not gonna give that one away til later. I’m currently toying with ideas of what works in the field, what ideas I have, what works in Etomite, and what Ryan showed me of his mockup.
If anyone has any comments or questions about the UI that they would like to voice at this time, please feel free! I would love to hear from you all if there are things that you think need to be added to the system that are not currently available or things that you think are there that already seem to work fairly well.
I have not and more than likely will not be revamping the following: the DOM folder navigation or the fact that it still uses frames. Unfortunately or not, Frames work best as the KISS solution for having a folder structure and an multiview pane on the same page. Frames may not always be the best, but I think for an administrative solution, its going to be the best option. That is unless of course someone wants to whip up something sexy for me to slap into my anchor tags to bounce one div out in favor of another one at a different file location
And the DOM thing...just not there yet in my programming skills.
Screenshots and previews to come sometime soon...once I have something other than code to display!
- John
MODX Staff