MODX Revolution 2.3 Manager Contest

I get the impression that the wording 'competition' has put some people off submitting designs?
If you're late to the thread, can I take the liberty of clarifying whats going on right now as we have identified a fork in the road. Please correct if you feel I am misrepresenting the current thinking or speaking incorrectly for you (original posters).

1. Design competition / collaboration
This is a short sprint to the finish as opposed to a marathon.
The 'finish' in question being the upcoming 2.3 release. Its a chance to put forward some resdesigns of the Manager which *may* make it into production for 2.3.X

Bearing in mind that we're contsrained by the current ExtJS framework (prison) the goal is not so much to identify sweeping changes to the layout Vs a cleanup of the interface presentation and to some extent the layout.

However, just because this is primarily a visual exercise, does not mean its a visual pastiche. If you're solving design and usability issues, please highlight those and explain (if you wish) how they informed what you've produced.

An don't let the word 'competition' throw you either. I don't think there's a podium with a single winning position. Its likely that elements from more than 1 design contribution may make it into 2.3 as long as it's not MODX UI Frankenstein.

Am in wrong, Ryan and Co? Feel free to correct.

2 Long term manager improvements
As correctly mentioned in previous posts and by timbodrumbo etc, there is also a long term goal (the marathon) of improving the UI of the MODX Manager beyond 2.3. I use the word beyond as I imagine the fruits of these discussions will mainly bear fruit in MODX 3 and onwards.

There'll be wireframes, use cases, focus groups, usability tests, exploration of the information architecture and all the juicy stuff that a great front-end design should be based on.

Anywho, I hope that helps if you've landed on this thread at page 4 and are wondering whats going on.

I get the impression that the wording 'competition' has put some people off submitting designs?
If you're late to the thread, can I take the liberty of clarifying whats going on right now as we have identified a fork in the road. Please correct if you feel I am misrepresenting the current thinking or speaking incorrectly for you (original posters).

Maybe the word 'competition' has put some people off from submitting designs. Maybe some people think if they didn't win or their theme didn't become the default it would be "wasted time". Maybe if we announced it differently there would be a different outcome. While these are all things worth pondering, one thing I've noticed is people ready to contribute and excited to share show up with a shovel and those unable to make that commitment don't.

Contribution to the Manager CSS have never been very high (~18 people) and I see this as one of several initiatives to try and change this.

Any 2.3 Manager Theme you create and choose to share will be available for others to use. So who cares what the default one is, really. We are trying to move away from the idea that there is one MODX Manager Interface. We're also trying to get people more involved with theming the Manager (and yes that means the current pain points too) to better the user experience and choices you have with how you present MODX to your client both now and in what we plan for future versions of the product.

You don't have to look for long to come across threads in the forums about pain points of the Manager UI. I think that means we need to do these things:

• improve the default theme
• lessen the barrier to entry to customize the Manager
• improve how custom Manager themes are distributed and shared

This competition aims at bringing awareness to all of that.

We could also ship 2.3 with multiple themes, so there is more than the default to choose from. For example, I've started working on an accessibility theme designed for users with particular eye conditions that is simply a very dark background with white text.

If you think helping us work towards any of the above meanwhile sharing something that may be useful to others would be wasting time because you may not win a competition, then i suppose you'd be wasting your time.

While bringing awareness that it is possible to customise the managers is great, and the fact that MODX lets people use different themes too, wouldn't it be better to fix one thing at a time?

The 2.3 manager is an improvement over 2.2 but not finished yet (I don't think anyone would disagree with that), and instead of focusing a competition on fixing the default theme, the competition aims to bring different themes instead.

My definition of wasted effort is when effort could have been better spend in a different way. In my opinion, the effort of the great designers in this community would be better spend improving the default theme instead of developing alternative themes. If it's just designing mockups, that can be a starting point for a discussion on the pros and cons by people who know what they're talking about, which leads to more iterations and improving the final result. That's great. Developing mockups into actual themes is days of work (no, changing the sass variables a bit is not enough to turn a mockup like Peter's into a theme) which adds little value to the discussion and improving the final result.

The manager themes that exist today that I know off (which are basically the default 2.2 theme but with different highlight colors) have been downloaded a combined 4000 times. If the top downloaded extra (Wayfinder, 194K) is any measure for the number of MODX sites out there, that means less than 2% of sites use a different manager theme than the default. 98% of them use the default one.

I just want to get the default theme done right before we start pushing for different ones.

Is there a tutorial around for getting someone from design to actual custom manager theme? Including simple GIT Hub instructions. I write my own CSS, have started to use CodeKit and SASS and would like to learn to apply my own tweaks to. 'Live' Manager.

Quote from: markh at Feb 07, 2014, 06:46 PM

I just want to get the default theme done right before we start pushing for different ones.

It sounds to me like you are implying that working on the default and participating in this contest are mutually exclusive and that by encouraging people to start their own themes with boilerplates we've worked to provide we are therefore discouraging the progress of the default theme.

The default theme has been in the develop branch at GitHub for several months now. Contributors are always welcome to send pull requests related to the default theme. If people want to start their theme by "forking" the current one, that is fine too. There's no reason that incremental changes they make when creating "their theme" couldn't be submitting as pull requests that enhance the default theme.

Quote from: eladnova at Feb 07, 2014, 10:15 PM

Is there a tutorial around for getting someone from design to actual custom manager theme? Including simple GIT Hub instructions. I write my own CSS, have started to use CodeKit and SASS and would like to learn to apply my own tweaks to. 'Live' Manager.

I'll do my best to round up some resources here. If creating mockups rather than actually writing code is more comfortable to you that is an option to. We love seeing different ideas of the Manager. One thing that is difficult though is unless you are familiar with the constraints we are working with, you may wind up with an awesome mockup with little to know likelihood of being implemented (it's a shame i know).

There are some RTFM posts on working with Git and MODX:
http://rtfm.modx.com/search/search-results?search=git&id=1325

We don't specify how you write CSS for your theme, but the default theme uses a Grunt based workflow that is documented here:
https://github.com/modxcms/revolution/tree/develop/_build/templates/default#contribution-guides

Working with Grunt does take being familiar with the command line, at least a little bit. This is a great article if Grunt still fears scary:
http://24ways.org/2013/grunt-is-not-weird-and-hard/

You could use Codekit to compile the Sass in the default theme, but you'd need to setup any frameworks that are managed through Grunt (Bourbon and FontAwesome)
https://github.com/modxcms/revolution/blob/develop/_build/templates/default/bower.json#L16

Simply logging and discussing issues is also a great way to contribute to improving the default theme:
https://github.com/modxcms/revolution/issues?state=open

Quote from: dinocorn at Feb 07, 2014, 10:39 PM

Quote from: markh at Feb 07, 2014, 06:46 PM

I just want to get the default theme done right before we start pushing for different ones.

It sounds to me like you are implying that working on the default and participating in this contest are mutually exclusive and that by encouraging people to start their own themes with boilerplates we've worked to provide we are therefore discouraging the progress of the default theme.

Perhaps not exactly mutually exclusive, but there's definitely a focus on creating new fancy stuff to run alongside the default theme, instead of improving the default theme...

I do want people to get more involved in the manager theme, and hopefully this contest is what tips the scale for many people to do so.

My opinion though is that the contest could have a better result if people would be asked to submit mockups instead of full themes. The mockups could be discussed by people that know what they're talking about and could, during the contest even, result in improved iterations. The best one would then only need to be implemented into the manager once. Save time by solving visual direction question first.

Quote from: eladnova at Feb 07, 2014, 10:15 PM

Is there a tutorial around for getting someone from design to actual custom manager theme? Including simple GIT Hub instructions. I write my own CSS, have started to use CodeKit and SASS and would like to learn to apply my own tweaks to. 'Live' Manager.

I started on implementing the design you posted on the blog last week, would probably save you some time to start with that: https://github.com/Mark-H/revolution/tree/ui-edenweb it's only the rough structure and colors so far though.

Quote from: markh at Feb 07, 2014, 11:12 PM

Quote from: dinocorn at Feb 07, 2014, 10:39 PM

Perhaps not exactly mutually exclusive, but there's definitely a focus on creating new fancy stuff to run alongside the default theme, instead of improving the default theme...

I wouldn't put it that way. There was a significant sprint to get the default theme to where it is today, with the uberbar, new top nav, revised tree and Sass structure. We're just as optimistic about seeing improvements made to the MODX theme today as any other, this theme contest has nothing to do with that. It has to do with getting the community more involved with what can be done now that we've modularized parts of the theme.

Implying that the team is less focused on the default theme because of this contest is silly. The beginning of this thread states the winner may become the default theme.

Quote from: markh at Feb 07, 2014, 11:12 PM

My opinion though is that the contest could have a better result if people would be asked to submit mockups instead of full themes. The mockups could be discussed by people that know what they're talking about and could, during the contest even, result in improved iterations. The best one would then only need to be implemented into the manager once. Save time by solving visual direction question first.

Mark,

I think that for the back-end of the manager, having a working group to do an Agile approach, which is what I think you're alluding to, would work. If we "decoded" what ExtJS does, understand it, then try taking an approach that for MODX "Y", the manager itself is an application, then we work on splitting off the pieces and have something like a show and tell.

My concern with this approach for the contest is that it would take longer and I think having the quick sprint to generate interest was the right thing.

I will say though that this contest, combined with the news of Theme Forest, has gotten a lot of people more interested in contributing.

I myself will not be entering anything into the contest, given that I can't design and I find choosing a pair of matching socks each day a challenge, but I am getting up to speed (albeit slowly) in Git and GitHub.

On the topic of GitHub, for those that are completely new to it, I found a series on YouTube that I found really helpful. Just search for "git and github 308tube" on YouTube. I personally found the guy's explanation just right for me.

@JP: Thanks for the additional links!

Quote from: eladnova at Feb 07, 2014, 10:15 PM

Is there a tutorial around for getting someone from design to actual custom manager theme? Including simple GIT Hub instructions. I write my own CSS, have started to use CodeKit and SASS and would like to learn to apply my own tweaks to. 'Live' Manager.

I have exactly the same problem. I have a good understanding of CSS, LESS and other "front-end stuff", even worked with ExtJS a few years ago (nothing MODX related though), but I don't know how to actually start a custom manager theme. I'd really like to try making a custom manager theme based on my own mock-up (see: https://www.bequadrat.de/blog/2014/01/modx-manager-re-thought.html), but everytime I try to start, I'll be redirected to some GitHub repository with a "_build" folder in it where "the magic seems to happen" - and I don't know how.

I think a tutorial would be a base requirement to get more design and front-end people contributing to this.