I’ve just rolled out our new AJAX-enabled theme for Virtualmin to the Red Hat-based OS repositories (I’m building the dependencies now for Debian/Ubuntu, and it’ll be in place tomorrow sometime). You can get it with:
yum install wbt-thejax-theme
It depends on the perl-JSON-DWIW package, which is currently only available in our repositories for CentOS/RHEL 3, 4 and 5, as well as Fedora Core 6. Other platforms will follow. The module is a binary build, and so much be custom-built for every OS and version.
Once installed, you can use the Webmin:Webmin Configuration:Webmin Themes page to select it.
It is a quite JavaScript intensive application, so is probably not going to work on older browsers. It is known to work, however, on recent versions of Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Internet Explorer (holy crap, IE sucks…took me days to get everything working in IE).
This is a preview release. It is not production quality. It has the following known issues:
It’s a bit slow. This is due to the loading of about 300k of JavaScript every time the content frame updates. It will be resolved by moving to a wholly AJAX update model, wherein all pages only load once and then they simply refresh portions of the page as needed. The left-hand menu already does this and is working very nicely.
It’s a bit funky looking in places. Not all of Webmin is making use of the ui-lib functions, and so there are some tables that have hard-coded table borders that look stupid and no amount of styling makes it go away. This will be resolved over the next few weeks as Jamie and I clean up these old bits of code…
It works in Usermin, but it has a lot more funky looking spots in Usermin, as I haven’t even begun to work those out.
The good news is that it looks really good (really, really, really good), and over the next few weeks I will be merging down several innovations introduced in this theme that make it easier for non-programmers to build themes for Webmin/Usermin/Virtualmin.
Feedback welcome, but keep the bug reports to a minimum–only report serious functionality issues, and nothing cosmetic. I know about the cosmetic issues, they will just take a while to correct. But the theme should be usable today–e.g. you could get by with only this theme if you had to (I don’t recommend you give it to customers yet, though…let’s just keep it between you and I for the next week or so).
Looks very nice --Great Job. Now where do you find the time to do all these amazing things you guys are doing.<br><br>Post edited by: ConRadical, at: 2007/10/10 07:32
FYI, I initially got a few Perl execution failure errors after enabling this theme on CentOS 5. After completely reloading the site (both frames), it appears to be working much better now. Very nice UI effects!
Unfortunately, “It’s a bit slow” is an understatement, at least on my system. The “Loading…” widget just spins forever in my sidebar. Eventually, the list of domains does get populated, but once I select a domain to manage, it never gives me the options above “Server Configuration”. In other words, I don’t have any menu options for “Edit Virtual Server”, “Edit Mail and FTP Users”, “Edit Mail Aliases”, etc., which basically makes this theme unusable for me at the moment.
I saw that problem during development–but I’m not sure why it would strike on your system (it hits me because I have Webmin devel code that has mismatched shebang lines).
You can make this problem go away by adding this to your miniserve.conf and then restarting Webmin:
internalcgis=1
This will make Webmin use a bit more memory and a bit slower, but it will allow the function that’s hanging to complete. As far as I know, this isn’t supposed to occur on systems that don’t have modules with different shebangs. But maybe there’s something else broken. (But this is something that needs to be fixed, regardless…I fought with it for a few hours, and eventually gave up.)
so, you can eventually get it to run, but it opens links in a new window, not the right frame… see also the weirdness whereby the left window does not show certificate error, but the right one does.
Hmm…Runs fine for me here. Try forcing a reload…Webmin’s theme handling confuses browsers (we’ll get that resolved eventually…it’s a historic aspect of the theming architecture that used to work fine, but now that JavaScript and CSS are core to everything, it leads to really weird issues).
Oh, and certificate errors are merely because it is a self-signed cert. If you installed the certificate into IE, setup a local CA, or used a real certificate from a cert provider, the errors would go away–the opening new windows thing is I guess triggering multiple displays of the same cert warning. Maybe. I dunno exactly, as I’m seeing good behavior from my IE7 and IE6 (by some definition of “good”, there are still many cosmetic issues on both IE and Firefox).
I did try it today. Seems be good but the only thing I found there is that the site list ( drop down menu ) can’t load properly in Linux Ubuntu Firefox. I didn’t check it in IE or Firefox in Windows. Here in Ubuntu linux it stalled on loading…
Not to rain on the parade, but I would appreciate a search function and simple dropdown menus like the Stress Free theme. It’s nice to be able to be able to quickly search for a function, or use the dropdowns instead of clicking [+] to expand all of the options, then using browser search to find the function.
Yes, of course. It’s in the Virtualmin Professional repositories–it will be the default Virtualmin theme soon. I’m releasing a new version with major changes in the next couple of days. As I mentioned the theme is still a preview release–it is not intended for production use. I’m hoping to finish it up and get it production ready in the next few days.
I really like this theme as it makes excellent use of screen real estate, however it just sits there trying to load the domain names into the drop down select box for me. So I cannot select a virtual server.
Earlier Joe mentioned the size of the ajax script and I wondered if Joe has looked at the MooTools Javascript Framework? Its about 40-45k compressed depending on features. Awesome framework…Joomla is using it in their new version 1.5. You could easily spice up the themes with the library with animated drawers etc. All cross browser compat too. It has ajax as well. (mootools.net)
I’m pretty well committed to ExtJS. The widget selection is astonishingly good–it has its flaws, but the end results is wonderful. I’m within a day or so of another release of this theme, and it’s got a lot of improvements…performance is no longer an issue. The JavaScript is only loaded once in the new version…that was actually a really easy problem to solve, I just didn’t know how at the time I rolled up the preview version.
I have looked at all of the other frameworks, and I think some astonishingly good work is being done in several of them. My favorite of the other options out there is jQuery. I’ve met John Resig a few times at Y Combinator events, and he’s just such an incredibly smart guy. The good news is that if we find we want to make use of jQuery for selectors and such, ExtJS widgets can back up to jQuery seamlessly. It’s a really nice compromise.
Anyway, it was just a preview release.
As for the bug you’re seeing, it might be the same one Alan saw earlier–edit the miniserv.conf and turn off internalcgis (or whatever it was I said do in that earlier discussion). It’s bug-like, but I haven’t figured out how to fix it yet.
I don’t have that version handy anywhere any more to package it up. I’m nearly there on a working new version, so you’ll have to wait a couple more days for a .wbm version. (As I mentioned, the previous release was not ready for prime-time anyway–it’s just something fun to play with, and see where things are going.)
