MODX Revolution 2.3 Manager Contest

Susan,

Okay it's offtopic but Grunt is the bomb. I was fed up with all these repeating tasks that are prone to human error and RSI. I've fiddled with it for some weeks and now it generates custom HTML, JS en CSS on the fly. 'grunt watch' watches for changes and does everything for me; copy files, livereload, concatenate, minify, uglify, inject LESS-variables depending on development or production environment and it even strips HTML-code when not applicable.

Quote from: AdamWintle at Feb 01, 2014, 07:53 PM

Would it be possible to make a default Bootstrap Manager theme, where other theme style sheets could be dropped in to quickly change the manager appearance?

There's tons of cool admin themes on sites like WrapBootstrap, that could easily change the style with adding one .CSS file.

At the moment ExtJs generates all the markup, so would some kind of "bridge stylesheet" need to be made so the ExtJs buttons are mapped to the Bootstrap buttons?

While nothing is impossible, I don't think this would be remotely feasible for a 2.3 release. Ext generates some fairly crufty markup. Even though this is an apply-lipstick-to-a-pig exercise, there's plenty of improvements that can be made to the basic type/whitespace/contrast departments. Don't be afraid to ask for help with more substantial changes, but you should probably count on those being the serious exceptions to what will likely occur.

Really nice initiative, i can't way to see what will be produced!

In the meantime, while not a designer, the current trees somehow disturbs me (in a UX point of view) : all are in separate "tabs" (resources/elements/files), which are horizontal (so the left space becomes "limited").

I would love to see some explorations using some kind of accordions. This would make the trees feel more like a real menu (ie. http://dev.sencha.com/deploy/ext-3.4.0/examples/layout/accordion.html), and would allow developers to hook in to add their own trees.

<lame>I'm late to this thread and have done limited UI work, but I did once build a CMS for posting my own content and it was an instructive exercise.</lame> A few thoughts on how to succeed in Web CMS UI, biased towards helping non-technical users:

• Step One: Find out why people like using WordPress. 'Cause many do. (I am not actually one.)
• Step Two: Check whether people like WordPress because it gives them a big simple editing window for the content - and for websites that get updated seriously by non-technical people, this matters. In general, find a way to save all the wasted space in the first 612* - count 'em, 612* - vertical pixels before you hit the MODX content editing field in a normal resource editing window. Christian Bartels' work goes in this direction. The Edenweb work is pretty but makes this problem much worse.
• Step Three: Think about whether we can get metadata off to the right, like Articles already does. You love metadata, and so do I. But when you're entering content, you are probably putting exactly the same thing into the Long Title and Short Title fields, and after a while this is going to p**s you off. Make one of the Titles a clone of the other by default, and put its field off to the right-hand side. (Note that in Articles, Long Title disappears by default.) Put the summary field off to the side too. And description. And the user info. And the MODX version details. And the name of the site, which for most end-users is never in question. (Let power users colour-code their sites, maybe.) And the MODX logo can be moved too.
• Step Four: More broadly, think about whether there's some way to deal with the fact that content is best entered into screen areas no more than 100 characters wide, but everyone's screens now have a 16:9 aspect. (Would two right-hand vertical panels be doable?)
• Step Five: Don't lose what's good, and there's a lot of that. The tabs (Documents, Settings ... ) and the Resources/Elements/Files tree are great solutions, even if the implementation of the trees has problems right now. The menu bar with drop-downs is fine in concept, though it could lose some vertical pixels.

I've attached screens of MODX (Articles view) and WordPress at the same height.
* Pixel counts using Chrome browser.

P.S. At any one time, most people are only working on a dozen or less documents. A "Recent resources" tab on the left-hand explorer pane, sorted by "last modified", might be a quick win. And is there any chance we could call them "pages" or "documents" all through the UI?)

P.P.S. The UI for user management is probably not helping an already difficult issue, but it's too hard a topic for people like me who don't know exactly what's going on in the innards of the code.

P.P.P.S. There seems to be general agreement that the bright green should be saved for the "Save" button. Good idea. Better idea - get rid of the save button, Gmail style.

I'm all for a working group to discuss and reach agreements on how to move forward from a UI/UX perspective so if there's any way modmore or myself can help with that, just let me know.

As mentioned in my earlier post I have serious doubts about the need for this contest to be a fully completed theme because it's a lot of work, many of which would be wasted if it doesn't get included in the core. When I first heard about this contest it seemed to be about unleashing creativity and getting people to work on designs (not implementations), so that could be used to build a final theme for 2.3 by a group of people. I preferred that over the terms as they are now.

Quote from: markh at Feb 05, 2014, 04:00 PM

I'm all for a working group to discuss and reach agreements on how to move forward from a UI/UX perspective so if there's any way modmore or myself can help with that, just let me know

I'm surprised this hasn't come up before. MODX is certainly in need of a working group to help ensure the interests of all types of users are represented. That is assuming that is the the goal of MODX.

Look at what Typo3 have achieved with NEOS (Http://neos.typo3.org) by collaboration and cooperation. They've built an absolutely amazing management experience for content editors and worked on defining common, web wide, development standards at the same time.

Steve

This topic is going somewhere! Mark I agree with you. That's why I'm not participating. I believe in a longterm approach. I would like to get invoved in "operation backrub' ;-)

We have to gather data from users. We have to know what kind of users they are: developers, techsavvy users or the marketing guy. We need objective input which you can measure by analysis and maybe quantative data would be nice too.
Maybe it's a nice sideproject to get some kwantitative data with JavaScript from the backend; like measuring time of click, which fields are used and so on. Data into one big database. If we could visualize this in a library like D3.js so you will see diagrams, bars and maps. Would be sweet it's possible and helping the problem. Yep I'm dreaming right. Focusgroups who would dive into other CMSes and try to figure out what works and what doesn't work could be helpful too.

Teamup physically is probably not possible so would should use 21century technology. I think we need to get skilled people on board and make teams based on skillset. A very important aspect would be to get data on a scientific approach. It should be done by collecting objective data on a standardized format. This is were we can build om. It will not be revo 2.3, 2.4 more likely revo 3.x.

Dangermouse do you know how they collaborate when contributors probably live around the globe? [ed. note: jambek2003 last edited this post 10 years, 2 months ago.]

Just yesterday Adam Wintle started a Trello board to organize MODX Projects and Initiatives. I like to think of this as a way to give people that have 15min of time a way to pick a task to do.
http://modx.com/trello

I've created a "Kick off MODX Manager UX Working Group" card under To Do. It is part of the Think Tank and On Hold, so leadership is up for grabs. This means there is currently no one spending active cycles on this task.
https://trello.com/c/g3hHEX3L/26-kick-off-modx-manager-ux-working-group

It would be great to get multiple contributors in on something like this because we don't have something like it. I've started a project called matboard where we have started research on different front end toolkits, but it places no emphasis on UI/UX.
https://trello.com/c/ILOyvsIE/4-r-d-for-a-new-manager

There's also a Bonsai project that aims to create a mobile friendly tree:
https://trello.com/c/HeSzPR1F/27-tend-to-bonsai

Part of the predicament I think we are in is how do we break ground on a "Better Manager" when we feel we need breaking changes to do so but we don't have much definition around what the next major version of the software will be. That said, I think some useful things to do would be to identify pain points in the current system. This is trivial,we all know them, and many are probably referenced in the GitHub issues. Even if we can't break away from ExtJS in 2.x, knowing and identifying the current issues will help us not make the same mistakes.

Another question is, what sort of UI challenges do we know we will have in the future and how can we best solve them? Markup first, Mobile First, Semantic, Accessible are important things to keep in mind.

If we go back to HTML rather than stopping at ExtJS, I think we can bring creative freedom back into a re-imagined Manager.

As mentioned before, I'd like to contribute as well. My Trello-Account is bequadrat, please add me