Hello Users and Developers, The editwizards are the standard editors for our mmbase projects at the moment. We usually only change some colors in the mmbase editwizards to match the customers brand. Several customers told us that they didn't like the look&feel of the wizards. A first-time user has a lot of problems to figure out how the wizards work. The editors of Web-In-A-Box had a redesign when we upgraded it to a newer version of MMbase. The new design is much more user-friendly then the editwizards. Two weeks ago I proposed on the devlist to make this 'WIAB' look the default one for the editwizards. The suggestion was to create an extension on the current stylesheets and override the things we don't like. So, the past 2 weeks I have been doing this. The extension now overrides 75% of the default one to get it the way we want it. I only tested it on IE yet so probably there will be more code to get it working cross browser.
Some changes I made to get it more user-friendly are: - Apart from the color change worked a lot on lay-out in order to improve the look and feel. - One wizardscreen can consist of more pages: steps. It is just a list with a previous and next button. We made 'tabs' of it, because everyone is familiar with that concept. - Wizards can become very long. An improvement is to use steps, but switching screens still requires a lot of scrolling. In our extension the buttons and tabs stay on the screen all the time. - Showing links to attachements and images only when they are present in the system. No dead links. The list of related objects are the messiest parts in the mmbase wizards. Most of the extension code concerns this part. - Better distinction between list of related objects and which buttons belongs to them. - Adding related objects by searching or creating a new one is on one line and clearly seperated from the listed objects. - Every listed object is shown screenwide and is separated by a line from the other objects. - The buttons to manipulate the object are grouped on the same line as the object. - Editting an object can be done to click on the listed object. - The searchscreen is a popup instead of an iframe. This way the window can easily be resized and moved around the screen. The iframe usually pops up with parts outside the screen. - Images in the searchsreen are non-clickable. Usually, users select the image by clicking on it. In the mmbase version the iframe dissapears, because the image is shown fullscreen. We provide a link beneath the image. We have the current version online at http://editwizards.finalist.com. The wizards with the extension are slower then normal because right now the implementation has to work with both (default and extension). That is why we like to make it the mmbase default. With this much more user-friendly layout the only thing you want are some hooks for extra functionality and an easy way to change colors. I'm working on making that very easy well by reworking the CSS files. Just try them out and let us know what you think and if there are any reason why this should not become the default. Nico Klasens Finalist IT Group Java Specialists
