Revolution Manager User Experience and UI. Help make it amazing.

@rnd

Ext is heavy but far from bloated.

Honestly, I tried many times to replace ExtJS by jQuery in project where i needed grids and/or heavy js interactions, and i always fell back to ExtJS because the coding structure and the tools/plugin available for it is superior to the jQuery counterpart.

I could have succeed to do the same with jQuery, but it would have required days of coding and i would have ended with an ugly code, hard to maintain compared to the nice OOP stucture of ExtJS, and most probably without some of the functionalities.

Quote from: lossendae at Jan 14, 2011, 07:44 AM

@rnd

Ext is heavy but far from bloated.

Ok, I was simply looking at the abundance of divs which is unnecessary, it’s script generated instead of neatly hand-coded. Yes, it will take more time, but in the end yields a more efficient manager. (Except perhaps the few grid based widgets.)

The second bloat, is the mentioned inefficient use of screen real estate.

I do realize coding a manager like this is a huge task and am happy that with the underlying reworked structure, we do have a manager that works, but it needs development.

rnd

Just last night a speed enhancement was proposed for optimizing the Revo Panel Manager: http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php/topic,59793.msg340121.html#msg340121 and in it Andchir’s proposal found a ~50% decrease in rendering time. This is awesome and splittingred tested, and made some additional changes to adopt this enhancement and it has been committed here: https://github.com/modxcms/revolution/commit/acef9382df3d9dca7c88e4bda3b0e6362e2734ff and will be in the next release of Revo.

We are absolutely committed to making the manager UI hum and with more help like this from people like Andchir we can do it! Thanks so much.

Just noticed I can set System Setting "resource_tree_node_name" to "alias" but then I cant seem to set "tree_default_sort" to sort by "alias". You can set it to "alias" but since it is not one the the previously defined values in the "Show Sort Settings" of the manager resource tree it appears to make no diff.

Checked Bug list and did not see anything in regards to this but not sure if it would be considered a bug.

Keep up the amazing work guys.

Feature request, maybe?

In many ways revo is faster than evo, for example you can drag drop, use quick update, save, and switch between resources, elements & files without reloading the page.

that said, it does feel very slow when you work outside those features. I think part of this is bloated code (955KB worth of JS, with 13 different http requests!) and part of it just the UI not being very optimized for speed.

some suggestions/observations:

- the right hand tree reloads every time you move to a new section even if you have made no changes
- every time I want to add a new package it takes at least 7 clicks. Make modxcms the default provider, with a option to change.
- does the top menu have to reload every-time I edit a resource?
- the tree folder slide animation is nice, but it would feel a lot faster if it just opened instantly like in evo
- I am always accidentally editing resource when I am trying to open a folder, make this easier to use and you cut down on a lot of unnecessary page reloads.
- form customization rules are implemented with JS and so take a few seconds to kick in.
- apply form customization rules to the quick edit window, because I can’t use this time saving feature a lot of the time.
- combine all of external javascript into one js file. I use http://rakaz.nl/code/combine
- use css3 for gradients, rounded corners etc to cut down on the amount of image requests.


I would like to see the the next version focus on improving the speed of the manager as it’s the one thing stopping me developing full time with revo.

@g5604 the MODx Revo theme use CSS3 extensively in replacement of default Extjs default image based theme.

Quote from: lossendae at Jan 24, 2011, 10:55 AM

@g5604 the MODx Revo theme use CSS3 extensively in replacement of default Extjs default image based theme.

sorry, I see now the css is well optimized, I just saw the 45 request for images.

I see you guys are discussing advanced features and the like. I’m a newbie to ModX and am starting on the path to learning it. If your goal is to attract new users, then you will eventually filter down to those of us with less than expert programming skills. I’ve been involved with product develpment for years (real products, not software) and I caution you to be careful to not get "too close" to your product or you will end up with a product that no new user will touch. I see a bit of that in ModX where less-familiar terms are used to describe basic functions or items. Reminds me of using American slang with a non-native English speaker. The first thing I need to do is to memorize unfamilar terms like snippet, chunk, wayfinder, elements, TV, symlink, etc. so I understand them in plain English. I’m not bashing what you’ve worked so hard to acheive, but please keep us new users in mind.

I was never happy with the education my children were (not) receiving in school, then I saw a box of one of my favorite childhood games, "Cootie". For those who aren’t familiar with this, it comes with dice and plastic body parts to create several "bugs". You have to roll the dice in certain order (roll a 1 to get a Body part to start) to get the parts to create your cootie. The player who gets his insect built first wins. A simple game, yes, but good for young children. I was stunned to see that what had been proper insect part names when I was a child have been dumbed down - feelers for antennae, tongue for proboscis. Not only is it not proper terminology, it’s not even remotely accurate. Antennae are not "feelers", they usually involve complex chemical analysis roughly analogous to smell, and a proboscis is by no means anything remotely like a tongue. Are we to conclude that our children are now too stupid to learn this stuff?

Developing and maintaining a web site using a CMS is much like maintaining a car, it is necessary to learn at least some basic terminology to be successful with any of them.