Hi Sharan and All, I believe this is a very important topic. The user interface is the weakest part in OFBiz and I think we should focus our attention on it. Based on your points discussed above and our brainstorming session in Apachecon I suggest we start with the following initiatives:
- Create a base theme. This theme would be raw (no colors, no design) that just works and renders things correctly. It also houses the low-level libraries and utilities shared among the themes (e.g. bootstrap, jQuery, etc ...). In addition, this theme would also house a unified FTL macro library to render _everything_ - Create at least one higher level theme based on the above mentioned base theme. - Modify the widget system to allow the creation of custom widgets. A custom widget can then be implemented _outside_ the framework (in the theme itself, or whatever user interface you choose like swing or FOP) - Create a component (we can call it backend or something like that) that provides all the back-end user interfaces for managing the system. The critical part here is to have _zero_ FTL, HTML, CSS or JavaScript in this component. All the web stuff should reside in the themes and the widgets remain a pure DSL. The current user interface is full of <platform-specific ...> tags for dropping in freemarker templates. So refactoring would be a huge pain. A fresh start makes sense and that's why I make the above proposition. Ideas? Thoughts? Cheers, Taher Alkhateeb On Tue, Nov 29, 2016 at 12:25 AM, gil portenseigne < gil.portensei...@nereide.fr> wrote: > Hi Paul, > > Nice point, i really think you're right about standardization, and that > will be a very important step to write down and to ensure it will be well > used/updated in future implementations. > > And indeed it will be huge work to migrate all component to this > standardization, and will be easier to write down from scratch new > standardized components. > > Thanks, > > Gil > On 28/11/2016 21:39, Paul Piper wrote: > > That wasn't meant as trolling, Nicolas. It is a good idea and absolutely > needed. Perhaps as a cautious advice: your problem is going to be > standardization, more so than the UI. > > The html in stock ofbiz is a mess and the apps don't really share a common > pattern. For Scipio ERP we cleaned it all up, which took weeks by itself > before we were even able to start on anything useful. Besides that, you will > have to think about the difference in development techniques used. Some apps > rely on *widgets, others on plain ftl. Whatever approach you choose, you > will have to either reimplement all apps, or take care of these differences. > > > > -- > View this message in context: > http://ofbiz.135035.n4.nabble.com/DISCUSSION-Improving-the-OFBiz-User-Interface-tp4699708p4699747.html > Sent from the OFBiz - Dev mailing list archive at Nabble.com. > > >
