On 26.05.2014, at 21:08, Christopher Orr <ch...@orr.me.uk> wrote: > You often hear people say "the Jenkins UI is bad", but it's usually said that > there's a lack of concrete examples of *why* it's bad.
Wait, people complain but cannot provide concrete examples? Let me! - Jenkins uses very long forms that also change contents (collapsing/expanding elements) without indication what changed (e.g. animation, highlighting), whichmakes it quite difficult to keep track where you are. - Inserting a new 'first' build step above half a dozen existing ones is really cumbersome. As is reordering build steps in general, as they tend to be rather tall in some plugins. Hiding everything in Advanced sections by default (see above) also doesn't help when it's a bunch of 30-50 line scripts. - Since elements have no obvious borders (unless dragging, or hovering the delete item), it's difficult to see where one element ends and another starts (Conditional Build Step, I'm looking at you!) - The Save/Apply area has a fuzzy "border" making it difficult to tell whether it's time to scroll when trying to edit a text field near it. You can see form elements, but not click them, because there's a low opacity white overlay over the white input field on white background. - It's possible to save forms with errors. Either you get a stack trace (not good) or the system accepts your input, breaking something a long way down the road (worse). Or nothing breaks and you wonder what is going on with the obviously broken input validation. - Important UI elements are not available in the model-link context menu because they're not in the side panel (notably disable/enable project and mark slave offline/online). - Jenkins cannot decide whether it's designed for a large screen (Matrix auth table with a plugin or two installed fits barely on 2560 wide screen) or not (400x300 load statistics until a few versions ago). User input can make content too wide for other users (content-controlled width of syntax-highlighted text fields). - It doesn't tell you which of the dozens of input fields were modified in a lengthy form you had open for a while. At least since 1.538 or so it tells you that you _probably_ changed something before navigating away, but still, starting over from scratch -- redoing everything I wanted to do, to prevent accidental changes -- is a common occurrence for me. - The first run experience is pretty weird if you look at it with some Jenkins experience. It just dumps you onto an empty page telling you to create a job, while only a completely different page shows a severe warning (no security), and the global config requires changes (Jenkins URL, mail server, ...) or otherwise things won't work right. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Jenkins Developers" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to jenkinsci-dev+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
