Moving this to the dev list...
Hi Aaron, Looks good. I'd like the default theme shipped with the next major release to be redone. It's quite long in the tooth. This would be a good start. What do you think about having the default theme shipped be similar to the vcl.apache.org<http://vcl.apache.org> site for consistency? That sounds really good to me. I like how the management links are much less prominent. I like to see the overall organization of things be reworked for the next release -- with things centered around a single page to manage your reservations including the combination of the New Reservations and Current Reservations pages. Administrative/management functions should be hidden most of the time and much less prominent. There are some topics related to this which would be more appropriate for the dev list but regarding jQuery, how do you think it compares to Dojo with respect to VCL? Any pros/cons you can think of? I have done much more development work with jQuery than with Dojo, so I am more positively inclined toward that library. Dojo does provide a lot of UI widgets along with the charts and graphs used in the reporting section, and these are not present in the core jQuery library. That said, most of the UI elements that Dojo provides could be swapped out for jQuery UI [1] or bootstrap [2] code, both of which have a much smaller footprint than Dojo. And for the graphing utilities, d3.js [3] is an excellent choice (it also has a small footprint). In the context of rethinking the UI, one thing to consider is the fact that there is so much HTML mixed into the PHP code. If I had my druthers (and a lot of extra time) I would rework the php code so that it generates only JSON. Effectively, the VCL front end would become a RESTful api, and then any javascript would render that data with some type of template system. A somewhat more realistic option might be to use a template system like mustache [4] (ideally) or Smarty [5] from within the PHP code. Best regards, Aaron [1] http://jqueryui.com [2] http://getbootstrap.com [3] http://d3js.org [4] http://mustache.github.io [4] http://www.smarty.net -- Aaron Coburn System Administrator / Programmer Web Services, Amherst College [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 6:21 PM, Aaron Coburn <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Hi, Folks, In case any one is interested, I have been doing a bit of work on a custom VCL theme for our installation. The theme is pretty minimalistic, but it completely changes how the menu is organized -- and bears very little resemblance to the default theme. It also makes heavy use of the twitter-bootstrap framework (for CSS) and jQuery (for some custom javascript). As far as I know, this doesn't require any code changes to the VCL (in our instance, I added a few lines of code to .ht-inc/authentication.php in order to have a custom "selectAuth" page). Also, in our instance, I modified the 'connectmethod' text in the database for ssh and RDP, but those templates are included with this code. I made a screen shot available, in case you are interested [1]. And all of the code is available on GitHub [2]. -Aaron [1] https://vcl.fivecolleges.edu/images/vcl-theme.png [2] https://github.com/acoburn/vcl-theme-fivecolleges -- Aaron Coburn Academic Technology Services, Amherst College [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>
