Print Page - Don't know if I shared it publicly or not

Public area => The Pub => Features => Topic started by: Arantor on February 13th, 2012, 03:16 PM

Title: Don't know if I shared it publicly or not
Post by: Arantor on February 13th, 2012, 03:16 PM

I can't remember if I publicly shared this stuff, (and can't quickly find evidence of having done so) but I thought I'd just show off the main ACP front page again, now that I finally got round to putting images on everything.

It's not really any different in terms of use - the menu is still where you expect everything to be - but this is what you're greeted with on entering the ACP. (see attached)

As I was poking around lately, I did wonder if the front page of each of those sections should be a placeholder of sorts, pointing you at the relevant pages, and the relevant tasks that can be achieved in each area, rather than blindly dropping you into whichever one happened to be first on the list, but that's something to discuss rather than to implement right now.

Most of the rest of the ACP is visually unchanged from SMF's time, even if a lot of changes have occurred as to where things are - but that's what the search feature is for, right? (And it is already better than SMF's, there's more in it than in SMF's, where we've moved things back into the conventional pages rather than in places like theme settings, but there's always more to do with that.)

Title: Re: Don't know if I shared it publicly or not
Post by: MultiformeIngegno on February 13th, 2012, 03:31 PM

I don't remember to have seen it. It's nice, clean and tidy! :)

Title: Re: Don't know if I shared it publicly or not
Post by: PantsManUK on February 13th, 2012, 03:41 PM

Very nice. Can I request alphabetical ordering for the major headings? :eheh:

Title: Re: Don't know if I shared it publicly or not
Post by: Arantor on February 13th, 2012, 03:44 PM

Oddly enough, no, there's a specific reason why plugins is at the bottom - it's the one most likely to be extended in all kinds of hideous ways meaning it can make things disproportionately large.

/mewaits to see who notices the design inspiration for this page and whether he'll have to run upon it being noticed.

Title: Re: Don't know if I shared it publicly or not
Post by: PantsManUK on February 13th, 2012, 03:59 PM

Quote from Arantor on February 13th, 2012, 03:44 PM

Oddly enough, no, there's a specific reason why plugins is at the bottom - it's the one most likely to be extended in all kinds of hideous ways meaning it can make things disproportionately large.

Ah, bien. A good point, well made.

And no, I've not yet spotted the design inspiration.

Title: Re: Don't know if I shared it publicly or not
Post by: Arantor on February 13th, 2012, 04:03 PM

Quote

And no, I've not yet spotted the design inspiration.

I'll let people mull it over but I will assuredly post a picture of what actually inspired this design in a while.

Title: Re: Don't know if I shared it publicly or not
Post by: Antes on February 13th, 2012, 04:05 PM

Simple as its need to be :) very well done.

Title: Re: Don't know if I shared it publicly or not
Post by: Dr. Deejay on February 13th, 2012, 04:06 PM

It looks very nice, I like the icons :)

Title: Re: Don't know if I shared it publicly or not
Post by: PantsManUK on February 13th, 2012, 04:13 PM

It does look a little bit like

(click to show/hide)

cPanel

in a passing sort of way, but that particular package is a hell on Earth.

Title: Re: Don't know if I shared it publicly or not
Post by: Asgard on February 13th, 2012, 04:43 PM

Looks great Arantor, and I know the inspiration, but won't say as it'd prolly be cheating. ~_^

Title: Re: Don't know if I shared it publicly or not
Post by: Arantor on February 13th, 2012, 04:46 PM

Quote from Asgard Dash on February 13th, 2012, 04:43 PM

Looks great Arantor, and I know the inspiration, but won't say as it'd prolly be cheating. ~_^

You know it was all your fault in the first place :P

Quote from PantsManUK on February 13th, 2012, 04:13 PM

It does look a little bit like

Well, where I borrowed it from and where cPanel got their mojo from have pretty common heritage... but I'm quite specific as to where I was most influenced by.

Title: Re: Don't know if I shared it publicly or not
Post by: Nao on February 13th, 2012, 05:50 PM

I'm not a fan of having dozens of big icons, myself... It just never really ticked with me.

But I trust that I'm the only one thinking that. I have to think of the majority really ;)

Title: Re: Don't know if I shared it publicly or not
Post by: Norodo on February 13th, 2012, 06:15 PM

Actually Nao, I think we can simply call ourselves a minority.

With this in mind, I must say I think it looks snazzy, and if it lets me do what I need to do I can have no complaints. :)

Title: Re: Don't know if I shared it publicly or not
Post by: Nao on February 13th, 2012, 06:32 PM

Well, I personally don't bother simply because the menu is still there for me to access my usual areas.
But once the homepage gets to be different from the menu order, it will certainly be an interesting alternative. Maybe we could even allow admins to hide and show and reorder icons manually... Like creating shortcuts to their fave areas..?

Title: Re: Don't know if I shared it publicly or not
Post by: billy2 on February 13th, 2012, 09:21 PM

Slick
:cool:

Title: Re: Don't know if I shared it publicly or not
Post by: TE on February 14th, 2012, 07:28 AM

very nice, I like it :)

Some suggestions:
Forum - Boards -> should be named "Categories and Boards"
Media - About -> should be moved elsewhere (e.g. combined with action=credits)
Plugins - Packages (old) -> should be removed or at least made hidden.

PS: the side bar is broken within the admin center screen.

Title: Re: Don't know if I shared it publicly or not
Post by: live627 on February 14th, 2012, 08:24 AM

The plan is to remove the old packages once the new plugin manager has matured completely ;)

Title: Re: Don't know if I shared it publicly or not
Post by: Arantor on February 14th, 2012, 09:19 AM

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Forum - Boards -> should be named "Categories and Boards"

Agreed.

Quote

Media - About -> should be moved elsewhere (e.g. combined with action=credits)

Agreed, though I've been inclined to let Nao handle that one, I don't like treading too hard on Aeva's toes.

Quote

Plugins - Packages (old) -> should be removed or at least made hidden.

Well, I left it up in case I wanted to use any of its code but since I'm not sure how much of the old code I'm keeping, I'm actually tempted to strip it out entirely and use SVN grab anything that I do actually want out of it.

Title: Re: Don't know if I shared it publicly or not
Post by: Nao on February 14th, 2012, 02:57 PM

Ah, the about/changelog page... I don't care about the about page, but I always thought the changelog page was beautiful. I'd like to keep the code around (maybe move it to the attic?), in case we want to use it later on, to convert our changelog to a file that'd be viewable within Wedge... I dunno.

You can remove package code all you want, btw :)

Title: Re: Don't know if I shared it publicly or not
Post by: Arantor on February 14th, 2012, 03:03 PM

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Forum - Boards -> should be named "Categories and Boards"

I've done this on my SVN copy, though I've called it Boards and Categories as you'll spend way more time in there poking at boards.

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I don't care about the about page, but I always thought the changelog page was beautiful.

Mind if I attack the about page then and move things to the relevant places where they come up in the admin panel? Just there's more in the about page than just 'about' AeMe.

Quote

You can remove package code all you want, btw

Yeah, I think I will attack it once I've got to a reasonably happy place with this code I'm working on today, just so it's out the way and if I need to refer back to it, that's what SVN's for :P

Title: Re: Don't know if I shared it publicly or not
Post by: Arantor on February 14th, 2012, 03:51 PM

Oh, and to those who were wondering, I don't have my Mac on right now (so I don't have a screenshot handy), but the base inspiration for this control panel was Mac OS X's System Preferences page.

Knowing that there are some anti-Mac people here, do I need to get my running shoes on now? :P And whether you like or dislike Apple's policies, I don't think there's much denying that they know how to build approachable UIs.

Title: Re: Don't know if I shared it publicly or not
Post by: Nao on February 14th, 2012, 05:01 PM

You have my authorization for the About page. Do delete the credits and stuff like that, if anything needs to be moved to the credits page feel free, but you don't have to keep the credit for Dragooon and I (unless he begs to differ, of course, but he's already in the Consulting Dev list in the credits page.)

I don't like Apple's UIs very much. Maybe that's why I'm not particularly drawn to the admin homepage? :lol:

Title: Re: Don't know if I shared it publicly or not
Post by: Arantor on February 14th, 2012, 05:15 PM

In terms of moving I was thinking stuff like the GD/FFMPEG/ImageMagick stuff could be moved to the page where all the versions of things are shown ;)

But I'll look at it once I'm a bit further along with this UI.

Title: Re: Don't know if I shared it publicly or not
Post by: Nao on February 14th, 2012, 06:06 PM

Yes, that's what I had in mind, too... But no time to work on that for now :) So have fun!

Title: Re: Don't know if I shared it publicly or not
Post by: Arantor on February 14th, 2012, 06:10 PM

Heh, I will - when I get the moderation filters UI done :P

Title: Re: Don't know if I shared it publicly or not
Post by: Nao on February 14th, 2012, 06:44 PM

Which is probably going to happen sooner than my finishing the auto-suggest rewrite, ah ah... (it's totally fucked up, if you don't mind me saying so. And here I was, hoping it would be easy enough to deal with single and multiple entries all the same, replacing findmember calls as needed... Ah ah.)

Title: Re: Don't know if I shared it publicly or not
Post by: Arantor on February 17th, 2012, 12:29 PM

So I started on this today.

I'm thinking that the AeMe changelog - like the SMF changelog - probably should be removed from the admin panel as a general rule, even as nice as AeMe's changelog page is. What occurs to me is that we should keep that stuff on wedge.org (perhaps separated by month, or by release or something, and even then it only needs to occur after we hit alpha, because then we just track changes between releases since alpha)

Thoughts?

(I'm still figuring out how I want to handle the rest of the items like FFMPEG/IMagick, but I got safe mode in there is a way I'm happy with for now)

Title: Re: Don't know if I shared it publicly or not
Post by: Nao on February 17th, 2012, 12:33 PM

- AeMe changelog should go, it's no longer relevant anyway, only for AeMe itself, and even then this'll eventually go too...
- SMF changelog should obviously go. I'm not even sure why it's remained in the SVN after all this time... :P Well, it has its uses, I guess, when I'm searching for a rare text entry and I'm not sure of the spelling... If it shows up in the SMF changelog, then I know I wasn't mistaken and I can keep looking elsewhere...
- Changelog/readme conversion code is what should stay, IMO, but I don't know what for... :P
- At the very least, it should stay in the attic.

Title: Re: Don't know if I shared it publicly or not
Post by: Arantor on February 17th, 2012, 12:41 PM

Well, I'm just taking a break to go have a shower (always good for clearing the mind), then I'll look at moving the conversion code to the attic, and dropping the existing changelogs from the current repo, which will take about an MB out of the current deployment size in total, I'd say...

Title: Re: Don't know if I shared it publicly or not
Post by: Nao on February 17th, 2012, 01:28 PM

Move the changelog, too. The format is special and needed ;)

Title: Re: Don't know if I shared it publicly or not
Post by: Arantor on February 17th, 2012, 01:42 PM

What I might as well do, actually, is move both the changelogs to the attic with the formatting code ;)

Title: Re: Don't know if I shared it publicly or not
Post by: Arantor on February 17th, 2012, 03:12 PM

OK so I've removed almost all the code relating to the about page, but there is one piece of information in there that isn't anywhere else at present: the list of who can manage/moderate the gallery (and the gallery moderation page reuses the same code/template)

So for the moment I'm just leaving that present and removing the rest of the stuff pending figuring out where to put it.

Posted: February 17th, 2012, 03:08 PM

Oh, and the 'installed on' date is a bystander in this too. Either we should keep it and make it a general setting (and put it in the admin panel more broadly) or we should drop it entirely.

Title: Re: Don't know if I shared it publicly or not
Post by: Nao on February 17th, 2012, 05:27 PM

- I don't believe it's important to list these persons there... Maybe, maybe, we could put them in the credits page? You know, in the first part of the page... But only if one of them wasn't listed before (i.e. not a mod/admin.) Then we list everyone.

- Speaking of credits... I did say I didn't want to keep the AeMe copyright stuff. Karl Benson and Dragooon are already credited as consultants in the credits page (and they're here to stay), and they're credited in the individual files where needed. I think my name is already too much on that credits page, especially in the French version where it's added one more time... :P

- 'Installed on' is really a freebie from Dragooon, I believe. It can go. It's here to find out when a forum was installed: take the date of the very first post (regardless of permissions)... If it's the automatic post by Wedge, then it's the real install date. Otherwise, it's the real 'first use' date, which to me is more interesting. This could go into the Stats page...

Title: Re: Don't know if I shared it publicly or not
Post by: Arantor on February 17th, 2012, 05:36 PM

Quote

You know, in the first part of the page...

Well, it would normally only be shown to people who have access to the AeMe admin or moderate panels, i.e. people who can already see it anyway, so it doesn't need to be there. But somewhere where it lists who can approve would be useful - I'm just not keen on it being publicly visible (which it would be in the credits page)... perhaps in the Media permissions page?

Quote

I did say I didn't want to keep the AeMe copyright stuff.

I know, but when I first removed it, it somehow felt like it had devalued the work that had been put in, you know? I'm just a bit fussy about making sure people get due recognition.

Quote

This could go into the Stats page...

Well, it would be trivial enough to capture the date on install and push it into settings rather than amSettings and then display it there. Heck, it's not as if forum age is something people don't always want to see, it's a mod that's done the rounds a few times.

Bleugh, brain has turned to mush from personal stuff >_< Can't figure out what's the best on this.

Title: Re: Don't know if I shared it publicly or not
Post by: Nao on February 17th, 2012, 05:52 PM

Quote from Arantor on February 17th, 2012, 05:36 PM

Well, it would normally only be shown to people who have access to the AeMe admin or moderate panels, i.e. people who can already see it anyway, so it doesn't need to be there. But somewhere where it lists who can approve would be useful - I'm just not keen on it being publicly visible (which it would be in the credits page)... perhaps in the Media permissions page?

Nah.
Why don't you want it to be visible to all?
Gallery moderators should be known. First of all, it gives a sense of responsibility to them. Also, sometimes a visible credit is pretty much the only way you're gonna get "paid" for your volunteer work, so you might as well credit everyone on a specific site...
Are you trying to say that you don't want the credits page to list the forum moderators, either...?

Quote

I know, but when I first removed it, it somehow felt like it had devalued the work that had been put in, you know? I'm just a bit fussy about making sure people get due recognition.

I see. You'd feel more comfortable if I removed it myself, right? ;)

Quote

Well, it would be trivial enough to capture the date on install and push it into settings rather than amSettings and then display it there.

If we're going to display it, yes. Otherwise, no need to capture it.
OTOH -- could be made even simpler... Since Wedge gets a list of monthly stats, why not simply give the first month of activity in the first stats area...? It's something that's already calculated, innit? Or maybe it's just the year... Not sure.

Title: Re: Don't know if I shared it publicly or not
Post by: Arantor on February 17th, 2012, 05:57 PM

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Are you trying to say that you don't want the credits page to list the forum moderators, either...?

There's one important difference that comes into play. Generally, forum admins/moderators will have a badge. Gallery moderators may or may not have a badge. So you may be making them better known than they might otherwise.

If you're going to credit their work, you'll give them a badge and we'll figure out something to make them visible, but if you don't want to give them a badge because it's a stealth role (and that does happen), or because a large number of people have the power to approve, it makes the credits page bigger - and probably slower, too.

I'm tempted to suggest we don't list anyone on there and have a proper staff page with contact options but I don't really want that in the core (despite the fact that, apparently, other forum systems do have this as core)

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I see. You'd feel more comfortable if I removed it myself, right?

I'd certainly be comfortable if you did it - but I was working myself towards me doing it, I just had to do that as interim step, as it were.

Quote

If we're going to display it, yes. Otherwise, no need to capture it.

I think it'd be nice to capture and display it.

Quote

OTOH -- could be made even simpler... Since Wedge gets a list of monthly stats, why not simply give the first month of activity in the first stats area...? It's something that's already calculated, innit? Or maybe it's just the year... Not sure.

Doesn't really work for imports unless the importer goes back and fills in some of that data...