I’m fine with it … and we can use the space on the right by perhaps making UI elements wider. A lot of them use a vertical layout or short text boxes to fit within the old layout.
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Fine! Then I’ll add it to my to-do list for Webmin 2.300.
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Just because they have the money to waste never should mean it is well spent or researched. There are plenty of institutions even governments that waste big budgets on things and come up with often ridiculous policies/plans that do nothing more than justify their existence and spending even more.
It should be more about
- priority of change (if it isn’t broken) it works
- is it required or just a wish full?
- is there a plan (justification)?
- can it be afforded (a budget available)?
Their choices reflect my understanding of the best independent research in the field. It isn’t just Google and Microsoft saying it is best. It is the general consensus in the field.
The idea that us (none of whom are experts in the UX field, I’d wager) spitballing ideas on a forum is a better way to settle on good usability practices than simply reading the research on the topic and following the lead of the largest companies who have monetary reasons to want their software to be easier to use is silly. There’s a reason Open Source software has a reputation for bad UI/UX, and it comes down to the lack of funding for this kind of thing.
But, when the data from a lot of the research on the subject is public and freely available, as it is in this case, it doesn’t take money to move in the right direction, it just takes the time to read the research and the time to implement it; I’ve taken the time to read quite a bit of that research. (Though I’m not always able to convince Ilia that the research is worth following, especially when it conflicts with what he thinks looks better.)
I don’t see any reason to argue about budgets, requirements, plans, priorities, etc. when it is already implemented. It just a matter of making it the default. We already invested in this change. Ilia put a bunch of time into it; and then made it default to two-columns for cosmetic reasons which probably broke the UX benefit of the change. 
It would appear that the ux developer ignores any criticism of the ux wether it’s good or bad so I guess we are saddled with that. Tbf I prefer the framed theme but with my issues gleaming white background means I can’t use it, perhaps a dark framed theme would be better for me
Not this one, we just had to present a good argument for the change.
Just read how many threads I have made in the theme area that have zero replies along with threads where I have made suggestions and everything just dries up
What are those threads? Did I miss anything?
What are you trying to say? Sorry, I didn’t get it!
@Ilia we had a discussion on this thread about the current layout (UX related) on this thread and you listened to people’s ideas and you decided to go with the horizontal layout as default and you would implement in webmin 2.3
@jimr1 implied in general UX changes were getting ignored because of some of his ideas got missed.
So I was just pointing out that webmin’s UX designers (@Ilia on this case) was a good one because you do listen to users.
So it was a positive message and also to say that it is not usual for anything to get missed on this forum.
The latest i posted was regarding theme changes for people with visual impairment zero replies to that one, again on the same theme a thread pertaining to the system monitors module/display, 3 years was taken to implement the changes to the webmin postfix module. A shorter period but still a while to implement the ability to view all banned ip’s in the fail2ban module. There are more but most of those date back to when authentic was introduced and are so long ago I can’t fully remember the context of hand, but I may be able to find my notes if your interested
Is there anything else in particular left that hasn’t been addressed accordingly? In particular something that you’re still missing?
The ability to remove items from the dashboard i.e system details, ideally making that item just another accordion, alterations to the system monitors to have the ability to high light each item (per server or per monitor) rather than a td with a br to terminate each server entry,in this case I now have over 50 monitors monitoring 15 services across multiple servers so I can actually high light the service and server, no ability to sort monitors by description. This is enogh for now but I will post a new thread for other changes that will benefit people who have either a sight impairment and or a brain impairment,of which I have both
Can you please create a separate feature request for each of those in either the Webmin repository or the Authentic Theme repository accordingly?
GitHub is better suited for this.
Lots of people have suggestions, we can’t implement them all and they aren’t always right based on the best research available to us. Some of the requests you’ve made require backend changes, too, sometimes pretty big ones, which Ilia wasn’t doing a lot of for several years (he was new to Perl and new to Webmin backend development back then).
I agree that accessibility is important part of UI/UX, actually the most important from my perspective, and I fight with Ilia regularly about accessibility issues in the theme (though less often now, he wants it to be accessible, it just took a while for all of us to get on the same page about what that actually means, and it’s not merely about blind users and screen-readers, though that’s also important).
We don’t have the resources to maintain and advance both Framed Theme and Authentic, so most work goes into Authentic. I wish we had more resources for everything, including UI/UX. But, we’re on a shoe-string budget here. Ilia is underpaid for all he does (and the rest of us make less, most months nothing in my case).
Anyway, issues related to accessibility are a high priority. If those get missed, feel free to bump them with a reply. (or make a github ticket, which is easier to keep track of than forum posts)
This is a wild thought, drop the framed theme and just have one theme.
Split all code handling from the templating and theme only with CSS (if not already).
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We mostly did that years ago. We only fix bugs in framed theme.
If it were that simple, it would have been done years ago.
But, you can do a lot of changes in Authentic Theme with CSS and JavaScript only.
That said, if only CSS had been as well developed in 2014 as it is today. In particular, the :has() selector is a game-changer and could have saved so much time and avoided using JavaScript for things it shouldn’t be used for. Also, Grid and Flexbox are absolutely excellent. None of this was available back then.
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I agree CSS is a lot more powerful now.
Update the theme to take advantages of this technology, so everyone benefits