The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

[Steve Shipway <address@concealed>]

So, I’ve been playing with the new Sympa 6.2 UI for a few weeks now, and I have come to the conclusion that, on the whole, I don’t like it.

 

Yes, it has a nice font and the icons are good, and the dropdown menus are convenient.  The new use of _javascript_ for menu control and icons is great.

 

However my main issues are

-          Everything is so chunky!  The fonts, forms, and buttons are so big that they take up too much space and you can’t see everything at once.

-          The lefthand menu area is wasted!  Under 6.1, the lefthand menu area contained a list of your lists, a list searchbox.  Now nothing apart from list info.  Before, we added extra items to this area, but doing that now seems to break layout of the whole page.

-          The Home page is hard to read.  Really, those 6 big boxes, some containing nothing but a single button?

-          List categories are unreadable.  They are squashed in a small box rather than being properly spread out as they were in 6.1.

-          List configuration pages have such chunky edit boxes that the screen becomes unreadable.  Only a few items on at a time.

-          The top menubar user/login dropdown disappears too easily, and our single-signon  button appears in the wrong place

-          There is too much empty space!

 

So (after this whinge), my question is – has anyone produced an improved CSS or set of Web TT2 templates?   And, if they have, are they prepared to release them or let me have a copy?

 

Many of the old Web TT2 files will still work under 6.2, but my problem is more with the CSS and the main menu structure.  I can’t just copy all the old files over because there are too many new features that require the changes in the Web TT2 to work.  To make all the changes we’d need will take a long time, and I don’t want to reinvent the wheel if someone else has already gone through it, especially since CSS tweaking can take ages.

 

If anyone has ported the old 6.1 UI to support the new features, that would be excellent – far easier for us to upgrade if we don’t need to train all our users on a new UI …

 

Steve

 

 

Steve Shipway

Unix Design Team Lead

The University of Auckland

T: +64 9 3737 599 ext 86487

E: address@concealed

(GNU Terry Pratchett)

 

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