The new manager - looking for best practice solutions

Just dropping by to say I love what I am seeing here, very cool 

And your PDF (design visuals v1) heped me dig deeper into your take on the UI.

Kudos !

Thank you again! It’s really exciting to see this coming out of the community. So very much appreciated.

Very nice. I think having slide-out panels on hover is a great idea. My editor (PhpED) has them and they’re fantastic to have -- always ready but invisible while your working.

I’d prefer them to use sideways text with the icons (at least as an option).  This discussion also reminded me that I’d prefer the tree view with tabs.

You can see both ideas in this screenshot from PhpED (I hope). It has the most comfortable UI I’ve ever encountered.

Thanks for the feedback,

I’d prefer them to use sideways text with the icons (at least as an option). This discussion also reminded me that I’d prefer the tree view with tabs.

Sounds like a great idea, I’ll have a play with the visuals and see how it works out.

I’ve been thinking about how we should tackle the new CSS/Ajax admin build and have found an interesting jQuery User Interface option at http://ui.jquery.com/home.

Knowing that modx currently uses mootools, would jQuery be a good option for the new admin?

JQuery should work fine with ExtJS and seems to have many advantaged over mootools.

I’d be interested to know general feedback?

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Additional, diging deeper into jQuery’s UI I’ve discovered the ThemeRoller, which is basically a interface of anyone wishing to build their own personal style. I would imagine if we build the new modx UI following the Theme Roller CSS API the new interface will be very easy to customise.

http://www.filamentgroup.com/lab/developer_your_own_jquery_themeroller_ready_components/
http://docs.jquery.com/UI/Theming/Themeroller

Revo doesn’t use Mootools, just ExtJS. The themeroller idea is great indeed, and jQuery sure does have some excellent UI widgets, but I’m not sure that this initial release will be able to take advantage of them due to the need to simply get the initial release out the door. ExtJS has allowed us to rapidly iterate through features and implement new ideas. That said, I’ll let Shaun answer definitively.

Quote from: modx at Jan 18, 2009, 06:32 PM

Knowing that modx currently uses mootools, would jQuery be a good option for the new admin?

I personally would rather not integrate jQuery - adding yet another 3rd party tool to have to manage and keep updated to the framework is something we should be avoiding.

I think ExtJS has enough of what we need, imo.

Shaun just so everyone can understand, can you elaborate briefly on why the decision was made to implement Ext JS vs jQuery + jQuery UI vs YUI? I know at the time it was started, jQuery UI wasn’t as mature, and as far as I’m aware, the grids in Ext still aren’t equalled from a functional standpoint by any other JS lib.

Quote from: rthrash at Jan 19, 2009, 08:44 AM

Shaun just so everyone can understand, can you elaborate briefly on why the decision was made to implement Ext JS vs jQuery + jQuery UI vs YUI? I know at the time it was started, jQuery UI wasn’t as mature, and as far as I’m aware, the grids in Ext still aren’t equalled from a functional standpoint by any other JS lib.

Well, a few reasons:

1. We wanted to use a framework that had everything already-packaged; i.e., I didn’t want to be using jQuery + YUI + whatever, but rather just ExtJS.
2. Like Ryan said, nothing out there really rivals the usability of the Ext grids; and I would add the trees as well. The code in Ext is far more modular.
3. The documentation for ExtJS is far superior to any other framework so far.
4. Again, like Ryan said, the jQuery UI was not very mature at all when we chose to use ExtJS.
5. Changing now would require a lot of rewriting, add additional overhead, and give us another dependency on a product we don’t control. We’re trying to eliminate external dependencies.

I personally find the jQuery UI + ThemeRoller amazing however I appreciate you’ve already looked into it . And as you probably know more about Ajax than I could hope to learn in a lifetime (me being a visuals type of guy) I accept your feedback.

However from my layman’s understanding, ExtJs seems to be very powerful and follows a typical JAVA approach with a steep learning curve, seems heavy on initial download and delays my access to the modx admin.

jQuery on the other hand seems lighter, easer to learn and with jQuery UI adding ThemeRoller offers all the widgets needed for an admin interface. As modx is open source and third party plugs should be encouraged wouldn’t an easy to learn Ajax approach open up the admin for many more community additions?

It seems that jQuery is lightweight (quick initial install) and offers all the required widgets needed for a UI.

When testing an admin UI for usability speed is a vital factor, maybe jQuery has many advantages which would make the modx theme ready, easy to customise and quick to use.

Just my thoughts