That would be a massive amount of extra work … probably best to adopt changes as bits are reworked/revisited for other fixes. I don’t think CSS is beyond more major changes :if() is not far away (at last!) and others (about time it became a real programming language.
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If it had been implemented when the technology became available the development curve would have been manageable rather than a massive amount of work
A dedicated (full time css specialist) member of the team perhaps?
Edit: Apologies for my sarcasm 
Why stop there? Let’s hire a whole UX team. (There is no money for even one competitive full-time salary, and I don’t mean in addition to what we currently pay everyone. I mean, literally, our whole budget does not cover one competitive developer salary.)
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I assume the Virtualmin team would welcome people to develop their own theme and submit it to the relevant repo 
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Ilia built Authentic before he worked for us. I’m not saying that’s a fair way to make a hiring decision, as most people can’t afford to work on something for months for free. 
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As you can see in the poll no one want the horizontal layout and from far I do NOT consider the google form an excellent example. It 70% empty, we don’t stop to search over and over after setting which are not present. It’s a complete waste of place. (Personally) I prefer have every thing at the same place than search down over and over.
And most importantly when you don’t have budget and you are editing professional application. The last thing to do is to waste time on design If the current one does perfectly the job.
NO ONE on this forum, NOT ONE new comer talked about the design. So no need to lost the team in thing which will never bring them anything back. The most important is features.
We are professional, we want working, bug free, applications and that’s it. The horizontal layout is mainly/only for phone.
Keep focus on good features and bug free modules. That’s it. And if you have budget put it in advertisement NOT in design (With such an amazing Cpanel it’s the last thing to do).
Then You may insist on the fact your are open source (and maybe more private than several other Cpanel).
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This topic was automatically closed 8 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.
I’ve just started looking into further improving the Authentic theme UI/UX, which is, by the way, quite a time-consuming process.
I then recalled our earlier forum discussion (this one) about making the single-column layout the default. After further reflection, I have considerable concerns that this change will have unintended negative consequences. Simply put, just enabling a single-column layout by default may not be the most effective and welcomed by our users solution.
While it’s technically possible to implement, it would require significant rework due to the large number of variables involved.
Meanwhile, multicolumn designs are still commonly used and often expected on larger screens — and yes, sometimes even for forms.
I understand that there are large studies suggesting the benefits of a single-column design for certain use cases, especially forms. Yet, even earlier mentioned major companies employ various layouts, including the two-column designs we use, for pages with forms, e.g.:
While a single-column layout makes sense in certain scenarios, it’s not universally applicable, and most importantly, it shouldn’t be considered a one-size-fits-all solution that can be implemented with a simple switch.
I’ll definitely keep this in mind for a future major theme rework, but for now, I think it makes more sense to stick with the good-old and well-recognized two-column layout as the default for our users.
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I’ll definitely keep this in mind for a future major theme rework, but for now, I think it makes more sense to stick with the good-old and well-recognized two-column layout as the default for our users.
I will start with, I recognise it is a lot of work and that there are a lot of other things that need your time.
Just for my reference there are from what I can see 2 types of 2 column which changes how a page collapses:
So if a decision has been made not to make this change at this moment in time I would have these recommendations going forward.
- Get rid of the Framed theme
- You are maintaining 2 code bases. I often see issues in one theme but not in the other.
- Remove the logic code from the authentic theme into the main virtualmin, webmin and usermin code.
- This will make the theme, the theme only.
- Joomla has nice class system for building and handling forms, I had a quick look and I think you have some thing along these lines.
- If you remove the code from the theme, people could design their own themes and maybe put it in on virtualmin.com for people to download
- Develop new theme (i.e. Plume)
- This can be done as a side project requiring no priority or pressure.
- This would “almost” be a skinning exercise because the code has been moved into the main code blocks outside of the theme.
- The theme would just have the UX/UI, javascripts (i.e. to make look pretty) required javascript libraries should come from the main code (i,e. the ones that do data preperation and validation etc…)
- It is at this point the layout can be re-looked at free from current constraints.
- Decommission Authentic Theme
- When the new theme is all working, decommission Authentic Theme so there is only one primary theme that you guys manage.
These are my thoughts on a roadmap for development. Obviously it is for the Virtualmin team to decide, not me.
This has my vote (why are there so many themes? (Legacy, Authentic, Framed) Are they ALL used or it it just can’t be bothered to change by users?)
but No don’t create a yet another new one - just adopt progressive updating.
We can’t do that — some people are still using it, believe it or not.
Yes, this part is a lot of work since Virtualmin isn’t the only module out there.
Ideally, no! This is what Authentic does currently. We just want everything to be generated by the server using the new UI library, with no magic happening on the theme side.
That would first require creating a new UI library with various additional layouts, and then applying it to Virtualmin and other modules. It’s a huge project. I can definitely do it, but it will take many months of daily work!
Because Webmin has over 25 years of history, and Virtualmin is nearly 20 years old. There are still people who prefer the older themes for various reasons.
Just my 2 cents for free. Work on other things. It works pretty well! Humans are pretty adaptable to layouts. Probably more easily than layouts are adaptable to many different critical humans.
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I am all for progress (and more importantly progressive updates). If world industry took the (“it was invented once upon a time”) attitude we would still be using the spinning wheel, the horse & cart, Windows 3.1, etc and my ears would be full of sand.
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- Schedule in an end date in the future and this will give them time. Maybe a lot of them just need a push.
- On an update you could push a notification that the Framed + other old themes will be deprecated. Come to this forum thread and discuss…
- That is what I meant, the theme would only have what it needed to look pretty code for everything else would come from the core framework code allowing the theme just to handle visuals.
- And themes could be swapped out without breaking anything
How about disabling all of the old themes on new installs?
@Ilia Thanks for listening to me, I think you got where I was coming from.
I don’t see the need to push users. Besides, the two themes function quite differently. The “Framed” theme is a simple application, making it easier to test and debug new server-side features, whereas Authentic is a single-page application that adds an extra layer of complexity.
I still don’t see the point in deprecating the old “Framed” theme. There’s no overhead in having it.
The old “Framed” theme could simply inherit the existing UI library. No need to delete it completely.
What’s the ultimate goal for this?
A theme is just a theme. It doesn’t hold back the progress of the project in any way.
I feel so comfortable in the older Framed Theme that I have just never taken the time to really dig into and experience Authentic — maybe I do need to spend some time using it to fully appreciate it
so – as a current Framed user, I would like to see it available in the future.
not to get off topic, but one advantage that comes to mind in switching to Authentic is the little button (?) on the top right that copies my environment/config for pasting into the top of a new forum post — I do not know how to do that with one or two mouse clicks when using the Framed Theme
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This topic was closed so I will simple copy paste what I already said:
As you can see in the poll no one want the horizontal layout and from far I do NOT consider the google form an excellent example. It 70% empty, we don’t stop to search over and over after setting which are not present. It’s a complete waste of place. (Personally) I prefer have every thing at the same place than search down over and over.
And most importantly when you don’t have budget and you are editing professional application. The last thing to do is to waste time on design If the current one does perfectly the job.
NO ONE on this forum, NOT ONE new comer talked about the design. So no need to lost the team in thing which will never bring them anything back. The most important is features.
We are professional, we want working, bug free, applications and that’s it. The horizontal layout is mainly/only for phone.
Keep focus on good features and bug free modules. That’s it. And if you have budget put it in advertisement NOT in design (With such an amazing Cpanel it’s the last thing to do).
Then You may insist on the fact your are open source (and maybe more private than several other Cpanel).
The poll result is clear ! Then as I alreay also said. The main thing virtualmin need IS ADVERTISMENT.
At this stage a new theme will not bring new comers. It’s not like this marketing works. What work is Mostly YOUTUBE VIDEO by streamers who have a lot of followers. And articles on platforms who have a lot of members. So don’t start to spend so much time on this (like so much indie dev did, thinking it will help get new members and at the end it did NOT help in any way). And focus on features (You may rework the JS part to save some load time when we change of tab/sections) and MARKETING.