Hi Marius,
welcome to the project!
The OFBiz backend's philosophy is to "show it all" in regards to the
comprehensive datamodel and the business processes it contains ootb.
Therefore nearly every project needs some adjustments to the UI, often
simplifying the processes and amount of UI elements. OFBiz itself is
designed to be changed and used as a business process framework.
The newer backend themes are based on Bootstrap already. While it
strongly depends on how far the modifications should go, you have
several options:
- use the forms capabilities to hide and reorder fields or change for
actions
- use the freemarker template engine to design your own templates with
the power to change the UI in every bit
The UI and the underlying service/database layer are decoupled so if you
change the UI you don't necessarily have to change the services as long
as you provide all non-optional data.
To retain upgrade compatibility, you should either write your own
backend modules or, if you only make minor modifications, mark them as
mods to easily merge while upgrading.
Happy OFBiz journey,
Michael Brohl
ecomify GmbH - www.ecomify.de
Am 17.10.21 um 09:41 schrieb Marius Schmidt:
Hi OfBiz Mailing list,
I am currently in the process of evaluating OfBiz as core system to
manage our newly founded IT cooperative. I might ask a couple of
questions over the next days :). Unfortunately some of the reactions I
got in presenting the backend were exclamations like "Really, but that
UI looks older than me!", "that will not be fun to work with" or "do
we have to fill all the fields?"
So after reading half of the partially outdated two OfBiz books on
Packt, the AsciiDocs I found so far and the quite fragmented
Confluence parts I am still not sure about this:
What would I need to do, to facelift the backend applications to e.g.
use Bootstrap as base and hide fields we are not going to need while
at the same time retain upgrade ability to future releases?
Best regards
Marius