[BlueOnyx:12690] Re: BlueOnyx: Modern Theme Screenshots

[Michael Stauber]

Hi Dave,

> In one of the images, it looks like the left menu is overlaid on the
> screen content - I have a natural dislike of anything that partially
> covers anything else.

That's one theme option that you can choose from. It's not enabled by
default, but might be interesting for those that want or need to use the
GUI on small screens. Likewise, for the screenshot I had windowized my
browser (instead of using fullscreen). On a typical 1920x1080 screen
resolution there will be no overlap. The screenshot shows the results of
a browser window which is just half that wide.

> I don't like the face icons. Most people won't use them. Those that do
> won't use them consistently so it'll just be a messy inconsistency. It
> would look tidier if they weren't there.

That's true. I'll tinker with various different ideas for that section
of the menu. Starting from replacing that image with something more
neutral to removing it altogether. Will have to see how it looks.

> What is with the blue ribbon which seems to have attached itself to the
> blueonyx logo on the login and admin screens? Does it have any
> functionality?

Nope, it's a useless design element. The original graphics in the
template had such a ribbon and I left it the moment. I'll give the few
graphics that will remain in the GUI a retouch once I have some time for it.

> Please, for the love of God, move the trashcan/delete icon away from the
> admin button! I have twice in my many years accidentally clicked on the
> trashcan.

But that's what the "Do you really want to delete ...?" popup is for. :o)

Nonetheless I'll see what I can do about it.

> Ideas:
> Set up a phpBB support forum or similar for self-support, and link to it
> from within the admin interface. This site would also be able to offer
> help with installing drupal, phpBB etc on BX without clogging up this
> rather wonderful mailing list.

Just to clarify: A forum just inside the GUI for users of this server
only? Or a public forum for BlueOnyx in general?

> Maybe allow a "Lite/pro interface [_]" check box that will suppress a
> lot of prettifying information like the BlueOnyx logo, mouseovers,
> tooltips, etc.

I'll think about it. As it is it's already pretty light.

> For the memory usage bar in one of your images, I have a visual idea
> that is hard to explain, but I'll try:

Oh? That one? No, it's just there during my coding and will not make it
into the actual GUI. It's just a developer tool that helps me to
determine how clean or nasty certain code changes are. Just the other
night I wrung out some capabilities related code and I could easily see
that it doubled the memory usage and quadrupled the execution/loading
time. Which made me immediately go back to make it more efficient.

The actual statistics in the new GUI (for system and memory usage,
sites, email-, web-, network- and other measurements) will use pretty
diagrams, pie-charts and info-graphs that are part of the theme already.

> I'd also like to see some kind of visual tool to see which accounts are
> using the most resources in Apache and MySQL, including visual
> representations of the volume of resources used. Highlighting
> resource-hungry accounts helps target clients who should maybe be paying
> a little more, or moved to a different server. Who has time to go dig
> for this information? Visual tools help greatly.

Yeah, that's true, I'm looking at options to greatly expand the scope of
statistics that can be presented. The old Sausalito way of doing this
was ugly and the collected data wasn't that great either. As it is/was
pretty useless, there was never any desire to improve it.

I'm looking at basic things like SysStat ("ar" / "sar" commands) up to
throwing a modified Milter in that logs Sendmail / Dovecot related
traffic to MySQL for the presentation of statistics.

However, I can already tell that the statistics and information
gathering and its presentation will be implemented near the end of the
development when the usual nuts and bolts stuff is already working very
well.

As useful as it can be and will be in the end, the basic GUI
functionality (managing services, sites and users) comes first.

-- 
With best regards

Michael Stauber