Hi Sharan, everyone,
It was idea like seed that start to grow up in my mind since I start
with OFBiz. Today, after several try on the project I think the
community is very closed to find the best way to improve the UI.
The first sharing was with Gil and Nicolas, then we decide to submit a
talk about that. The big surprise was that Taher have the quite same
ideas than us !!!
There are many things that must be done to have a good UI.
- All the UI could be managed by the theme without modifying the
framework.
- Each screen must be linked to a screen structure.
- We need a UI standard that the developer need to follow for screen
creation.
- We must have a common theme (remove all theming stuff from the
framework)
- It could be interesting to have a new component to improve / test a
new theme
- We have to create at least a new theme without limits ! Be crazy !
It's a long term project, but it must be our concern, all the people
that want a beautiful and UX UI must be involved \o/ I remember when I
start bootstrap topics, that we were many ;)
This project is more ambitious, a long term one that will improve the
theming automatism to provide to the webdesigner an unlimited tool and,
in the same time, an easy to maintain framework for us ;)
Why we need a new component to test new theme ?
When I start working with OFBiz, I was so surprised that the UI is too
heavy. Then I was thinking that I have to improve the UI to provide a
best one. After several try I understand that the actual UI is not a
final user interface. It is a developer one. It's a developer UI because
it contain all the features developed. But definitively, we can't
provide this kind of UI to final users, we have to simplify it. In the
same times, we can't delete the current UI because developers need to
improve it with new features that will help us to deploy new features to
our final users.
For this new component, we can implement an existing component but
simplified and ready for the new theme(s).
In conclusion, if the new component dedicated for test a new theme match
to the community needs, Taher think to a super simplified developer user
interface that facilitate developers to improve the software. A new
interface without any constraint that allow developers to develop easily
new features.
What about the new theme ?
A new theme, maybe more than one theme. It could be crazy but if we need
to be sure that we can do anything we want and that the screen structure
allow webdesigner to do whatever we want, we can imagine 2 new themes
exactly different in structure :)
I have at least an idea, just for the look and feel. I can share it and
we can improve it all together (or just scrap it and start with a new
idea ^^). In the same times, at the Apache Con we meet Victoria
Bondarchuk
<http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/apachecon-europe/program/schedule>
(work in UX project management) that want to help us in this task, and
Darshan Kumar (work also in UX) who want to join the OFBiz project
starting on that task.
How to start ?
I propose to start by creating a main Jira about Improve the UI (maybe
this one already exist since a long long time ago ^^) and then link all
the subtasks to this main one. Maybe we can start a topic by subtask to
share with the community.
Before creating anything it could be interesting to have opinion of all
people who want UI changes. All the community I think, so I hope server
will not be down because of the OFBiz community involving ^^
I hope Paul, Gaurav and all the people that try or already improve the
UI will help on this task \o/
I want to be an actor of this changes and I hope you want it too !
Thanks for all your help in advance.
Julien.
On 28/11/2016 11:28, Sharan Foga wrote:
Hi Everyone
Another one of the topics that came up during the brainstorming in Seville was
around the UI. In fact we had at least 2 presentations from the OFBiz track at
Apachecon that were about how we could improve our UI.
If the UI was the main focus - what could the strategy look like
- User Interface - have 2 versions of the UI, one very clean and simple, the
other more advanced. (Our current UI could be the advanced one....?
- Separate the web part from the widgets
- We have too many fields on one screen (many of them are not mandatory and are
just included as optional). What if we slimmed down all the screens to have a
sensible default UI for users. The UI could also be modifiable by service
providers. Simplify the screens with defaults
- Use Bootstrap / CSS / Angular
- Isolate web related
- Define a graphics charter to be used for the screens
- Have a CSS convention
- Remove web from the framework - it shouldn't be there
What do people think?
-Do people think it would be a good idea to have 2 versions of the UI? (a
simple one and a more advanced one?)
- Are these the things we would need to focus on or have in place if we wanted
to focus on the UI?
(Also I know Nicolas has mentioned that he has already started work on a Proof
of Concept for a common theme - so do we need to make sure we agree
conventions etc before much more work is done?)
Thanks
Sharan
