Xaraya Aruba 1.2 Roadmap: UI Enhancements

The Aruba 1.2 Roadmap, Milestone 5, is for user interface enhancements. 
  The first Enhancement under M5 is "Eliminate optional display modes in 
core module admin screens".

Specifically, this item targets Blocks, Modules, Themes, and Roles. 
These modules allow the user to choose various modes for how information 
is presented.  We can eliminate unnecessary options and simplify our 
interface by reducing these modes, ideally to one per module, which will 
most resemble our other screens.

Furthermore, it should be considered whether we standardize on text or 
icon links in admin screens.  Using icons allows our interface to be 
more visually interesting and compact, while not sacrificing usability. 
The iconify scenario has implemented icon links throughout the core, 
however another revision soon will add title attributes to ensure there 
is a textual explanation for the icons.


Blocks

Blocks has three areas where this simplification could apply, Instances, 
Groups, and Types, however only Instances has multiple modes:  Plain and 
Compact.

Plain is the default which most closely follows common convention. 
Instances are presented in a full width table, one instance per row. 
Columns shown here are Name, Groups, Module, Type, Template, Status, and 
Actions.

The alternative, Compact, splits the instances into two columns.  The 
rows in each column show Name, with bracketed text for other 
information: group memberships, template (represented as "D" for 
default, otherwise the template setting is shown), status (as "H" for 
hidden or "M" form maximized), "E" for edit, and "R" for remove.

Compared to our other screens, Compact is very dense and cryptic.  Its 
stability is also limited, as an instance's membership in several groups 
can cause the rows to flow into each other.

Compact should be removed.


Modules

Modules, in admin-view, has two modes: Plain and Icons.  These modes 
share the same layout, the only difference being text links in Plain 
being replaced with icon links in Icons.  Implementing icon links would 
eliminate the need for the mode switch.

Modules also references other modes (selstyle) which are not currently 
implemented: compacta, compactb, and pro.  These references should be 
eliminated.


Themes

Themes admin view has two modes: Plain and Preview.  Plain follows 
convention, while Preview prevents theme information along with a 
screenshot (which few of our themes provide).  Each mode can optionally 
show text links or icons (which can be eliminated by adopting icons by 
default).

Preview mode should be eliminated.  However to preserve the usefulness 
of the screenshots, the theme name should be made clickable to display 
the image if available.


Roles

Roles admin-showusers has three modes: Simple, Tree, and Tabbed.  Simple 
follows the convention of showing a table.  Tree inserts a hierarchical 
rendering of the groups above the same table, while Tabbed replaces the 
tree with a tab menu.

Tabbed, while its addition to the interface is pleasantly compact, is 
far less useful to the user than the tree.  However, on sites with a 
large and/or complex group structure, this can increase load time 
dramatically.

Tabbed should be removed.  The fieldset which contains the Tree should 
initially be displayed containing only an unchecked checkbox labelled 
"Show group hierarchy".  When checked, the tree could be loaded via AJAX 
(in "Use jQuery to add UI richness across the core" under M5).

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This is my assessment.  Thoughts?

See:  http://www.xaraya.com/index.php/xarbb/topic/3397