Hey all,
I've just checked in a huge slew of changes to the Virtualmin Bootstrap theme that I've been developing for...um...well, let's not talk about how long I've been working on it. It's embarrassing.
I've re-worked the menu into a ul/li-based tree view rather than the awkward content panel based accordion menu I'd been using for a while. I'm not sure which one looks better, but the markup for the new one is much nicer (fewer tags, less deep nesting). There's still some polish to be done to the stylesheet, but it's functional now.
So, here's the screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/6wxVZ3E.png
I'm curious whether folks prefer the new menu or the old. Here's the old, just in case folks don't recall: http://i.imgur.com/e5ilWQh.png
Note that there are still some unconverted links at the bottom in both screenshots; those are next on my agenda, but the appearance of those in either menu design should be ignored. Whichever menu we roll forward with, they'll be styled to match. I'm leaning toward the new one, but will certainly consider other opinions.
If anyone really prefers the old one, and wants to continue development on that path, I've tagged it with "old-accordion-menu" on github. https://github.com/virtualmin/virtualmin-bootstrap-theme/tree/old-accord...
The master branch on git now has the new menu style, but if we find this is less awesome than the old way for some reason, we can pull that code back out.
Please note that this theme is still not ready for production use. It really is only suitable for folks that want to help development. This is the closest to usable, so far, but it's still definitely not usable; I haven't wrapped page loading in a try-catch, so any broken JavaScript anywhere (of which there is a ton in old Webmin stuff) will break the whole page. I'm trying to actually fix the broken JavaScript rather than work around it, though we'll ship with the exception-catching enabled.
Anyway, if you want to play with something closer to production quality, Ilia's Authentic Theme is a very cool theme that is much closer to production-ready (though it also has a couple of missing Virtualmin menus, that he's working on and we're going to be helping him get resolved, ASAP), and it is also in active development. I believe the Finally theme by Luiz is also coming along nicely, though it too has a few quirks, and I haven't heard as much from him about ongoing development.
Cheers, Joe
One more screenshot just for fun, after a long day of polishing, adding small icons to the menu, and other cool stuff: http://i.imgur.com/8h22rmv.png
Also fixed a few things you can't see in the screenshot but were keeping the theme from being usable. We're actually almost there. The last "big" issues have turned out not to be so big once I focused on them and thought them through. I'm aiming for a fully-functional (but probably still buggy) alpha release by next week, and a beta a week after that. Production ready version...I dunno. Depends on how well the alpha and beta go, and how much testing it gets and whether my JavaScript skills scale up to the task of fixing the remaining quirks.
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Just wanted to say this is looking great - I prefer the new menu and can't wait to try this out.
Yet another screenshot. I'm playing with bootstrap glyphicons as placeholders for now. Will likely either use the expanded options in Font Awesome, or create our own icon font (or switch over to SVG icons, which is the long term goal).
http://i.imgur.com/45iOTEk.png
On another front, I've made ui_select elements that perform an automatic form submission (via "onChange='form.submit()") actually work correctly now, but ignoring that JavaScript and adding a class to indicate a reload into the rightContent pane is needed onChange.
There are probably a half dozen remaining bugs preventing an alpha release, and I'm knocking out two or three per day. I believe the first alpha release is on schedule for this week.
Currently, the theme is nearly fully functional for Webmin and Virtualmin (I'm using it full-time on some of my systems and I'm able to actually use them). Cloudmin and Usermin are still horribly broken, and I'll disable all support for them in the release versions until I have a week or two to dedicate to making them work correctly.
One remaining bug that likely won't be fixed by alpha release is System Statistics graphs aren't working in the new theme. I have no idea why. I've spent a few hours poking at it, and identified an overlapping namespace, but fixing that does not resolve the issue. The plan is to move to a newer graphing library, eventually, anyway...but, that'll take even more time. If anyone is familiar with the TimePlot library we use for statistics graphs, and making it work alongside jQuery, advice or patches would be welcome.
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Joe this is a trick question I trust :) How can anyone prefer the old one? Anyway congrats to you and Ilia; we can hardly wait till the themes are production ready. I might even say something weird: it's not the price, nor the functionality (saw some discounts?) that doesn't get you new customers. It's (please don't mind)... old themes, funny icons, lack of ergonomy, the Java file manager, everything Java in fact (please just don't replace those with Flash, now more than ever, when Adobe will drop Flash for Linux till 2017), ugly stats and so on. It's the looks and the perceived clumsiness. I really don't mind those (except I hate the guts of the File Manager), but that's what everybody around is telling me.
You should give some serious thought to spare the time to face lift the suite. From your point of view right now it should be even more important than adding a few new features... Security issues, yes, bugs, yes, CentOS/RHEL/Sci 7 stuff, yes; but no new features until you are done with a new theme :D Because a good and nice interface is in fact the best feature.
Especially Usermin - this really is what most of the people, most of our clients in fact, see from your work.
GJ once again!
Don't take the name of root in vain...We're mostly on the same page, but...well, we don't really have the choice to say, "work on nothing but the theme", because Jamie is, in no way, a designer. He's a monster coder...but, when it comes to theming, well, you've seen what Webmin has looked like over the years. No amount of time spent by Jamie on appearance would make it look really great. So, code is still happening, and design falls on me and whatever favors I can pull in from friends with really good design sense to guide me toward something really nice. But, we're agreed; Virtualmin actually has more features than it needs, and certainly more than any other product on the market in its space, but the UI is currently pretty awful.
And, there will be no Flash taking over for Java. I hate Flash, and don't even have it installed on my some of my machines. We're slowly working toward all JavaScript for interactive stuff. There is already a shell that is JavaScript in Webmin (AjaxTerm), which takes the place of the old Java command shell. The File Manager is a whole other beast, but we'll get to it eventually.
Also, I'm getting a lot of push for better forum capabilities and a faster/better website, so I'm kinda juggling the two big projects right now, among other things.
Anyway, a big part of the time is that my knowledge of JavaScript is rudimentary, at best. I'm learning as I go. I always welcome guidance and bug fixes on that front.
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Thanks for your kind answer mate. Maybe I shouldn't ask this here... but do you consider adopting someone else, let's say... Ilia with his "Authentic" theme? He is working hard, I mean at an infernal rate and seems pretty dedicated, his changelog scares me https://github.com/qooob/authentic-theme/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md :) . Making it an "officially endorsed and distributed by Webmin theme"?
No matter your choice, it seems that it would be a good ideea to review and approve/dis- the themes anyway, as we are talking about a hosting panel, in which people login also as root.
Don't take the name of root in vain...Yes, we have talked about doing just that...and it is likely we will include Authentic in our repos, and maybe as the default theme. The theme I'm working on is tackling new types of problem, and is taking a long time because of it (and because it's new territory).
In the near term, however, it is clear that Ilia's theme is a great improvement over the current default theme, and he's fixed most of the things that would prevent it from being fully functional for Virtualmin (Cloudmin and Usermin still need some work, and we are waiting on Jamie to make some changes in Virtualmin to make menus work better in Authentic).
We can't yet ship it, is what I'm trying to say, but not because we don't love it and wouldn't consider shipping it. It just isn't quite ready for that. Not for any failing on Ilia's part...theming Virtualmin is hard. Part of my work on the new theme is making it not so hard. But, until that work is done, and it gets merged into the Webmin 2.0 branch, new themes are agonizingly slow to develop and complete.
But, trust that new themes...good ones that fundamentally change the Webmin/Virtualmin/Cloudmin/Usermin experience for better, are incoming. And before the end of year. We will enter our 10th year of Virtualmin with a new look and feel.
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A big thing about Authentic that I dislike is since it tries to simplify some of the layout, some important system or virtual server options are missing and it makes it hard to navigate if you are used to the old theme.
That's a known issue. We've been working on getting Ilia the tools he needs to fix the problem in Authentic, in the form of a new function to generate menus. It wasn't intentional for the extra Virtualmin menus to be excluded in Authentic, it's just really complicated to get the menus right. The latest version of Virtualmin (coming out in a couple of days) includes the necessary changes for themes to make use of the new theme function. The next step will be for Ilia to get Authentic updated to use those functions; last I heard he was wrapping up one of his own projects, and so it would be a few days before he can tackle Virtualmin stuff again. (I don't want to speak for Ilia, but that's the state of things as I understand them from the discussion on the ticket about this issue at github.)
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[DOUBLE POST]
Thank you for the good news!
Don't take the name of root in vain...PS - Glyphicons are FINE! :D
Don't take the name of root in vain...Long time I never searched for themes, but these days started to look again around for what's new and I was impressed.
I'm glad to find here that Joe is cooking some for us, u master chef :)
On the other hand, Authentic theme is a great work and It's good to hear that will become official :)
Anyway the Finally, Luiz's work seams a great look improvement for default framed theme and I suggest to take a look in it.
Again congratz' all to that great work,
CHI