[OFBiz] Dev - UI mutations, system promotion and other stories...

[Adrian Crum]

Ean,

I truly appreciate the comments. I like to see other people's 
perspectives of OFBiz.

My work with OFBiz involves adapting it to work as a back office 
application for my employer (we don't use the eCommerce component). I 
agree that much of the UI is too complicated (or vague) for a typical 
office employee to use. The approach I've taken is to build simplified 
UI components upon the OFBiz services.

One of the recurring problems I've run into with my work on OFBiz, is 
the code redundancy - too many files are copied into components, instead 
of components sharing common files. That's why I'm pushing for (and 
contributing back to OFBiz) the common template ideas and the 
component-specified CSS files idea.

One of the things I've implemented here is user-specified UI themes. I'm 
sure that concept seems frivolous to many of the OFBiz developers. But 
like the Wiki interface you mentioned, it makes the interface more 
interesting and fun to use.


Ean Schuessler wrote:
> I would like changes to be even more direct. I think a common problem that we 
> have (and this occurs in many places) is that the admin interfaces are geared 
> to people who are basically at the level of knowledge of the programmers. The 
> interfaces are easy enough to use but almost uniformly I find that clients 
> are very intimidated until they receive some training.
> 
> The Wiki interface, on the other hand, usually requires little more than a 2 
> minute demonstration before users are eager to give it a try. That is the 
> reaction I'm looking for as opposed to the current content management 
> interface.
> 
> I think we need to look for ways to make things more "peel the onion" 
> oriented. Make interfaces high-level and task centric, exposing people only 
> to what they need to achieve common tasks. The danger, of course, is the 
> Microsoft phenomena where things are easy until they get hard and then they 
> are very hard. How exactly to avoid that isn't entirely clear to me.
> 
> Am I rambling?
> 
> On Thursday 31 March 2005 12:12 pm, Adrian Crum wrote:
> 
>>I was picturing developers using whatever tools they're familiar with -
>>using their local FS, then going to an OFBiz webpage to "commit" those
>>changes to OFBiz. The "commit" process would scoop up the changes from
>>the local FS and put them in the DB. What motivated that idea was the
>>"restarting the webserver" problem. But as you point out, it doesn't
>>make it any easier for developers otherwise.
> 
>