UI (and other) changes in Revolution?

Quote from: Donatas at Aug 05, 2008, 04:31 PM

Hi, I’m pretty excited about the revolution of MODx, but I’m not very into this coding stuff. However I would like to ask, if there are any screenshots of the 0.9.7 manager interface? This interests me, because I’m a web designer. I’m not familiar with SVN very much, so I wish I could just glance at some simple JPG screenshots. Thank You.

P.S. I have few websites running on MODx, and thank god on MODx Great job! Looking forward to the official Revolutional release! Keep up the best work!

Bear in mind the the new Manager is highly customizable. Here are some quick shots of the current default look:

I’ve just started to play with revo and, on the manager side, it is a very big departure from the previous user interface. Many things are greatly improved, better organized and customizable.
There is one thing though that just doesn’t work for me : that is the accordion display on the left side. The redrawing is annoying, going from one accordion to the other involves useless flickering etc...
I thing the problem of having several panels on one spot has been already solved many times over: what work best is tabs (see Eclipse development tool panels on the left, Opera Browser panels on the left, Photoshop palettes on the right etc...).
Why not to have simply Resources, Elements, Files as tabs on the top of the left panel. No more flickering, better use of screen real-estate. Technically, I suppose it is probably a trivial change.

Anybody has any thoughts on that?

Quote from: lmestre at Jun 25, 2009, 11:36 AM

I’ve just started to play with revo and, on the manager side, it is a very big departure from the previous user interface. Many things are greatly improved, better organized and customizable.
There is one thing though that just doesn’t work for me : that is the accordion display on the left side. The redrawing is annoying, going from one accordion to the other involves useless flickering etc...
I thing the problem of having several panels on one spot has been already solved many times over: what work best is tabs (see Eclipse development tool panels on the left, Opera Browser panels on the left, Photoshop palettes on the right etc...).
Why not to have simply Resources, Elements, Files as tabs on the top of the left panel. No more flickering, better use of screen real-estate. Technically, I suppose it is probably a trivial change.

Anybody has any thoughts on that?

We had it as tabs initially, but that idea was shot down in early alpha development in favor of the panels, much to my dismay. This, in my opinion, is still up for debate which is better.

Fitting tabs in the current layout would also take some redesign work - there’s not really a place for it in the current design.

I’d vote for tabs too..

EDIT: and just to add.. those accordions hasn’t quite worked for me either.. for some reason the accordion panel is usually very tall (like 2000px) and goes out of the visible screen area even though there isn’t any resources.. (FF 3.0.11) but I do have Firebug and Adblock etc, so it probably happens because of my browser setup..

In any case I’d like tabs better.

EDIT2: and if I can mention another thing that has bugged me is, that when the page is loading we get these "loading..." popups while various things are loading.. they take the focus away each time and I hate that. If I go to create a new document for example, I can click to the title field right away once it’s shown and start editing it, but then the loading popups start popping on and they take the focus off every time.. I remember one occasion where I clicked the focus back to some field for 4 times after finally giving up and just waited until all popups were shown.. so.. Are those really necessary? Or could they be done so that they wouldn’t take the focus?

Quote from: doze at Jun 25, 2009, 11:53 AM

EDIT: and just to add.. those accordions hasn’t quite worked for me either.. for some reason the accordion panel is usually very tall (like 2000px) and goes out of the visible screen area even though there isn’t any resources.. (FF 3.0.11) but I do have Firebug and Adblock etc, so it probably happens because of my browser setup..

Probably firebug. I don’t get this problem at all.

EDIT2: and if I can mention another thing that has bugged me is, that when the page is loading we get these "loading..." popups while various things are loading.. they take the focus away each time and I hate that. If I go to create a new document for example, I can click to the title field right away once it’s shown and start editing it, but then the loading popups start popping on and they take the focus off every time.. I remember one occasion where I clicked the focus back to some field for 4 times after finally giving up and just waited until all popups were shown.. so.. Are those really necessary? Or could they be done so that they wouldn’t take the focus?

I’ll look into it. I’ve been wanting to move those into masks anyway.

Loading box removed in most recent SVN.

Quote from: splittingred at Jun 25, 2009, 12:34 PM

Loading box removed in most recent SVN.

Superb!

Hi

I’m not so bothered about using tabs on the left if the accordion could be made ’static’ between page redraws (so it doesn’t appear to open on each page view but is already open with the panel that was last selected).

BUT, I would love to see tabs in the main editing area, so that Page settings is restored to a tab as in Evo. For two reasons:

* it’s a step backward in usability to not be able to see the resource you’re editing highlighted in the tree (since the document tree accordion panel is closed).

* I’d like to be able to build custom components and have various fields appear in separate tabs. Much like ManagerManager does with TVs in in Evo...

I like everything to be configurable.. so:

Quote from: therebechips at Jun 25, 2009, 12:51 PM

I’m not so bothered about using tabs on the left if the accordion could be made ’static’ between page redraws (so it doesn’t appear to open on each page view but is already open with the panel that was last selected).

Yes, accordion should definitely remember which panel was open between page reloads and draw it as open on load.. and I also think that it should be possible to open multiple panels in the accordion at the same time.. but still, I’d like that there would be a system setting where you could enable tabs instead of that accordion.

Quote from: therebechips at Jun 25, 2009, 12:51 PM

BUT, I would love to see tabs in the main editing area, so that Page settings is restored to a tab as in Evo. For two reasons:

I guess this is going to be implemented based on this topic, but it’s going to be configurable (yay!).. I prefer the panels.

Quote from: therebechips at Jun 25, 2009, 12:51 PM

* it’s a step backward in usability to not be able to see the resource you’re editing highlighted in the tree (since the document tree accordion panel is closed).

Yeah.. if multiple panels could be open at the same time in the accordion (e.g. if they would be implemented just as normal collapsible panels and not an accordion), it would remember what panels were open and then just add that page settings panel to the top being open by default (and possibly in "non collapsible" mode).. But if tabs would be configured to be enabled instead of the "accordion" panels, the page settings panel would be created just as the same at the top and then the tabs panel below it containing the web resources, content elements and files in tabs.

Quote from: therebechips at Jun 25, 2009, 12:51 PM

* I’d like to be able to build custom components and have various fields appear in separate tabs. Much like ManagerManager does with TVs in in Evo...

Yes, this would be great and I guess it’s planned to be implemented at some point.. or am I wrong..? But it wouldn’t matter if your extra "tabs" would be created as separate tabs or separate panels, based on the system configuration.

I’m not sure how well the tabs would work with Quick Create and Quick Update and having them as an alternative would create some severe headaches for documentation and tutorial creators.