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

Dear Jay,

Your points are well taken, and with only two primary developers I’m sure there are many priorities on the table.

To clarify: my comments were not only focused on the experience of developer users, but the many (hopefully thousands) of non-technical content administrators of websites who might not know much more than "paste the doc into the form fields".

I’ve deployed MODx Evo on two client sites, plus two of my own.

When I go and do the work of posting articles, I can wrestle through just about anything, since I’m the one who designed and deployed the sites to begin with.

But... when the admins of the other sites work in the Evo manager, they’re limited by a very small set of web skills, and are busy business people to boot.

So, I just wanted to throw out the idea that an extremely intuitive, easy and blazingly fast Revo manager should be *very* high on the MODx roadmap, to bring joy to all of those future non-techie content admins; and thus turn them into viral fans of MODx.

I DO honor all the fantastic work all the developers have done .

Peter

lossendae,

The Manager is still built in MODx using the API with ExtJS but you are correct that there is compromise and consequences that were very seriously weighed. I agree that it limits what you could do in the main manager but in another context one could build and entire Manager without loading Ext. In addition, Opengeek still has the Revo (097) core running with an Evo manager on one of his servers. It is possible for sure but hard and we don’t expect (although it’d be nice) to have the community help out with such an undertaking.

I think an HTML manager is still in the back of mind (although JS is absolutely necessary for any web application in 2011 as it has become part of the user expectation for a desktop-like experience for some things.) but not on our official roadmaps due to very sane and valuable planning that is going on with MODx in general.

As for day to day performance for developers, my recommendation is use a fast browser like Chrome and if using Firefox limit the use of Firebug as it will cripple performance on any JS driven app as it processes everything all the time and slows response times significantly.

Cheers,

Jay

Peter,

Thanks for clarifying. We are very aware of end user experience as a driver of any great content management platform. We absolutely need to make things work for them so there is little frustration and friction in an organizations communication and marketing or whomever needs to update the site/app.

Speed is certainly important but content IA and structural design can make a significant difference in that experience too. LIke many who employ ManagerManager in Evo, Form Customization and roles can help achieve many things you need to improve user experience by relabelling fields to match content, not displaying fields not relevent to the content type and restricting users access to the things they don’t need. Revo does a pretty decent job of this but it can certainly be improved. We will improve Revo in browser performance where we can through optimizations and other possible solutions.

Thanks so much for your thoughts and ideas. Keep sharing and discussing.

Cheers,

Jay

Dear Jay,

You’re welcome and thank you .

Onward and upward.

Peter

@Jay

As you pointed, a less JS heavy interface is possible AND necessary.

As a matter of fact, i am doing a dumbed down dashboard to manage galleries, blog, basic predefinied user permissions and a set of system settings.
It will act as a supplement for (my) users who need basic Admin features and didn’t like the actual interface.
In the meantime, it will not be a real alternative to the actual MODx Manager because Shaun release some awesome new features almost weekly.

Now, i’ve made a quick tour on the Sencha forum and ExTJS 4 look really promising reagarding performance (some benchmark here and there shows tremendous improvements on DOM speed).
An alpha is coming soon, i will be one of the first to play with it for sure.

I think that ’ctrl + s’ command should save the resource. And we could use others keyboard shortcuts...

ctrl+alt+S saves currently. It’s not preferable to use CTRL+S, because this does not work in most browsers.

Quote from: splittingred at Jan 12, 2011, 10:31 PM

ctrl+alt+S saves currently. It’s not preferable to use CTRL+S, because this does not work in most browsers.

Oh, that’s great! That’s something I didn’t knew... It could be more clear about this shortcuts!

:)

Shortly after Revo 2.0.0 was released I submitted a feature suggestion to add the system variables beside each field as a popup or hint (PageTitle, Menuindex, etc). I just noticed in v2.0.6 that those are there. Thanks. That is awesome.

Hi modx team,

my first post regarding revo that I installed the other day.

I share Peter’s analogy of the sports car and his thoughts on the manager which imo needs some serious development.

A few suggestions:

1. package manager: it should be made clear one needs to click the add button for a package list to appear. The way it is now one sees a ’loading..’ sign and nothing appears in the list, which one later finds out will hold the *installed* packages. (..)

2. there’s an inconsistency regarding the use of the modx color green as the selected color. In menu’s it’s correct, but in tabs the selected tab is grey and inactive tabs green.. utter confusion.

3. overall the design takes up far too much screen space, requiring a lot of unnecessary scrolling, etc. that is, put the UI on a diet.

4. to my taste, terminology can be less corporate and better understandable: why ’lexicon’ while ’dictionary’ or ’language’ is widely used for these kinda things.

5. ajax search to find settings, etc. is not such a good thing from a new user experience. Most designers know people look for stuff at places, what do you look for when you have never seen it or have a concept about? The desktop metaphor has been so successful for a good reason.

Perhaps modx should ditch extjs, which in all respects is bloatware, altogether and go with something more accessible like the ever popular jquery. It will attract good UI+UX people to modx; I would love to see the revolution happen, but it won’t happen without them.

My 2 cents for now, great work so far.

rnd