On 4/15/2018 11:13 AM, Jan Høydahl wrote:
Upayavira, moving from jQuery to AngularJS took the approach of building a clean parallel code base, with the downside of years of maintaining two UIs. Do you see any better approach this time around?
I'm onboard with writing a whole new UI in a more modern framework. I would love to help, but I feel that I'm not well qualified, because my understanding of Javascript and CSS isn't as complete as I think it needs to be. I'm not completely useless in those fields, but it takes me longer to figure out how to do things.
I think we should do a similar switchover -- build a new UI, make it optional at first. We could wait for 8.0 to make it primary, or if we feel it's ready, make it primary in a later 7.x release. Then we can remove the old UI in the next major version after the default changes. As soon as the new UI is made primary, the old UI should have a note on every page saying that it is no longer maintained and may not work properly. I don't think we should ignore bug reports on the old UI, but they won't need a high priority.
As part of a new UI, I think that we should be careful to duplicate and extend current *functionality*, but that we should not restrict ourselves to making it look/feel exactly like the current UI. If a redesign would work better, especially on mobile, then we should do that.
The current UI does work a lot better on mobile devices than the previous UI. I avoided using my smartphone for even information gathering because it was terrible. I don't have a tablet, but I think that administration with tablets is becoming very common. My smartphone is in the "phablet" category -- large screen with higher than HD resolution.
Thanks, Shawn
