On 18 Jun 2008, at 17:41, Terri Oda wrote:
[...] the more user input we get, the better!
Another thread said that “the web UI is scheduled for overhaul”.
Is anyone assigned to this? Is it an open process? Can we follow it
somewhere?
I think the admin UI suffers from:
1. Too many options.
2. Weak categorization.
3. Typographically bad, e.g. no visual cues about significance,
related options, etc. and right-aligned labels make it difficult to
skim down through a page.
4. Labels are too verbose, contributing with noise to the overall
view, and the “Details for «the_mailman_option_name»” under each label
does not help in this regard.
I believe the current UI is generated from the Defaults.py, which is a
contributing factor to some of the above. Is the plan to keep
generating the UI, or would it be OK to actually design a UI?
Switching to a designed one means more work when adding new options
that require UI, but considering that the current UI has been the same
for as long as I can remember, it’s not exactly a moving target.
Also, having the lists themselves stored as pickled objects make it
problematic to leave stuff out of the web UI, but I would strongly
suggest that the lists switch to using a plain text format.
Anyway, for the overhauled web UI, I will gladly participate in the
process, if I am welcomed, but I think it might be a little
controversial because I probably want to cut all the options I
consider unnecessary, for example does an admin really need a web UI
for setting whether or not digest users are allowed to switch to
immediate mail delivery? etc.
I think a first step would be to find out what options actually are
necessary in the web UI (and presently there are some stuff not
available that I would like to have there, for example the list URLs
really should be visible in the web UI). Next step would then be to
categorize this stuff sensibly, and after that, we can look at mockups.
But as indicated above, at least step 1 should probably not be done
“by committee” because you want to be harsh and not include some
arcane option that one guy argue is really very useful to him :)
If the pickled lists were instead plain text, that would be much
easier, because then it could be a very clearly stated goal that the
web UI is for the stuff most of us want most of the time, and for the
more exotic stuff, there is the list config file.
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