Ilia (officially) joins the Virtualmin team

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#1 Thu, 09/17/2015 - 01:07

Joe

Ilia (officially) joins the Virtualmin team

Hey all,

As most of you know, Ilia has been working on his incredibly awesome Authentic Theme for quite a while, and has been a Virtualmin and Webmin user, as well. As fewer folks know, a few months ago, we started sending a few bucks Ilia's way every month to "encourage" continued development of Authentic and anything else Ilia wanted to work on in the Webmin world (he's also been involved in making the Filemin File Manager even cooler by adding lots of cool JavaScript tricks). And, we've been working with Ilia behind the scenes to assist in whatever ways he has needed, in order to help to move things forward with the theme.

Over the past year or so, he's truly performed heroic feats for usability and appearance within Virtualmin. And, as of today, he has been added as an administrator here at Virtualmin.com, and will be an official support contact for all Authentic theme-related issues in our ticket tracker going forward. If you've ever filed a ticket at the Authentic Theme github or interacted with Ilia here in our forums, you know Ilia is super helpful, extremely responsive, and truly dedicated to making his theme flawless.

For hardcore users and developers wanting to help out with the theme, this doesn't change a thing, if you don't want it to. You can still file tickets and issue pull requests at Ilia's github for the theme, if you like...but, going forward, when Authentic theme becomes the default theme in Virtualmin (and eventually Webmin and Cloudmin and Usermin), many users will want one point of contact, and that point of contact will continue to be Virtualmin.com. Now, Ilia will be here to make sure questions and bug reports get prompt attention from the person best able to handle them. And, you can still contribute directly to Authentic theme development by donating on Ilia's Github page.

We hope to integrate Ilia further into the everyday operations and decision-making within Virtualmin (as much as his time and our budget allows), and hope y'all are as thrilled about this news as Jamie, Eric, and I are.

Regards,

Joe

#2 Sat, 09/19/2015 - 13:15

Diabolico

Fantastic news and Ilia did amazing job with Authentic theme. I think Virtualmin will only profit having Ilia in the team.

- I often come to the conclusion that my brain has too many tabs open. -
Failing at desktop publishing & graphic design since 1994.

#3 Mon, 09/21/2015 - 11:55

southshoremedia

great to hear. i'm about to install it on a dev machine now. question though - how does this affect the work that you've done with the bootstrap theme? does that project now serve just as an exercise to get the internal coding ready for theming? i remember there were many hurdles that you had to overcome on this as well.

in other areas, i assume this frees you up for other work... like webmin 2.0? how is that coming? could you provide any big-picture ideas for what the goals are for that? like how do you turn an already great system into something even better?

thanks for your efforts.

#4 Tue, 09/29/2015 - 13:11 (Reply to #3)

Joe

Sorry for the slow reply, I've been lost in Drupal lately.

So, to answer your questions:

re: My Bootstrap Theme. It's been put on hold, but a lot of UI re-factoring I did will make its way into Webmin ui-lib over time. Some of the functions have been looked at and borrowed from by Ilia in his theme, but mostly Authentic is all new stuff on the frontend and very few changes on the backend. There are still places in Authentic where I look at it and see that the only way to make it (even) better, is to simplify the markup...places where display is being generated by a large number of nested tables, for example, still look at a little clumsy in Authentic (though vastly better than in older themes). That'll need to be fixed eventually. So, yes, my old theme will end up being where we draw a lot of the new ui-lib for Webmin 2.0 from. I'll work with Ilia on porting his theme to the new ui-lib. But, the fact is: Authentic is just a better theme than mine was; and it's better than mine would have been even with continued work. Because my time is always so divided, and frontends are not my strength, it would have likely never been quite as good as Authentic is today, and the real strengths of my theme was in the backend work that went into making it functional as a single page application. That'll come into Webmin proper and into Authentic with time.
Yes, it frees me up to work on other stuff; and that other stuff has mostly been the website migration, which has been kind of happening slowly for, it seems like (and may actually be), years. Unfortunately, Drupal is a nightmare to upgrade...particularly project_issue, which literally has no upgrade path from 6 to 7, I'm having to write custom tools to make it work. But, project_issue contains more than half of the user content from our site, so there's no way we can call the site upgraded until the issue tracker is working and has all that old data.

All that said: There will be major announcements and releases for both Virtualmin and Cloudmin in the next couple of weeks; Authentic is part of that. I won't talk about specifics, but you'll like where we're going with everything, and I think you'll be pleasantly surprised at how much has been going on behind the scenes. I haven't disappeared, I've just been keeping my head down working on hard stuff, but the end of that work is near, and we'll be announcing really cool stuff, soon.

Check out the forum guidelines!

#5 Fri, 10/16/2015 - 17:41

nibb

Great news.

Any idea when it will be shipped as default on new installations? I assume there is still some heavy testing to be done before it can completely replace the current one.

Some suggestions is to make documentations or hooks to make it easier to customize or integrate with external systems or mods. While I like this new theme, please take into account that I think it should be more flexible when it comes to customization which will not break in future upgrades. I mean adding some items or even pages to the menu, logo, changing colors, icons, or adding your own code to a specific page, like inline help, etc.

This is what makes a theme powerful, not just how it looks, but how flexible it is when it comes to changes and custom tweaks.

#6 Fri, 10/16/2015 - 23:29

andreychek

Any idea when it will be shipped as default on new installations? I assume there is still some heavy testing to be done before it can completely replace the current one.

Very soon! Actually we were hoping it would have been done already, but we're hard at work on some things and it should be ready very shortly.

The current hangup is actually some other stuff we're looking to do at the same time; once that's ready we'll be releasing a few goodies :-)

-Eric

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