Is there any improvement being done on the user interface?

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Jonathan Dillon-Hayes	Wednesday 14 April 2004 12:05:03 am I just demoed the interface to hotbanana, a 10k commercial CMS solution (demo.hotbanana.com). The administrative interface is truly fantastic, and has solved some of the serious interface problems my clients have experienced with eZ. I'm going to level some constructive criticism about the interface of eZ. My clients don't like it much. I get comments like "that's it?" and "this is so simple, what am I paying for?". I used to think they were compliments, but after demoing a few commercial systems I see more what they are talking about. Even with the OE Rich Text Editor component installed, there is no access (without custom programming) to (c), (R), TM, and other special characters, adding images is confusing as all getout for firsttime users, and you can't add them through OE), you can't define any workflow components for the page (it would be fantastic to be able to specify which users and groups have access to the page right there in the interface, or as part of the page creation process), there is no spell checker, no bullet points, no paragraph indentation, no underline, no strike, no align center or right, no undo, no < hr > tags and you can't specify whether editors should be able to hack on the source code. The OE really needs some work IMHO, as it's really not worth much out of the box... I know it's very powerful, as you can put all kind of custom tags right at the fingertips of the clients, but out of the box, it looks pretty paltry compared with the slew of online editing tools that our clients are used to. I would really like to see more work go into the backend of eZ Publish. I think the changes you guys posted in the backend are fantastic, though the screenshots were too small for me to make out the details. However, a lot of the editors I've put this system in front of almost immediately reject it because, well, it looks pretty sparse. I mean take a look at this: http://dynarch.com/htmlarea/examples/core.html This is an editor thats included in 1/2 the cms solutions out there. Let me give you more concrete examples from the hotbanana system of what I think could be improved. We deal with a 1/2 dozen CMS solutions every day, and some are better than others. This one is really quite good. Take a look at character encoding, a major gotcha if you're using eZ Publish. In HB, you click on the little character button, and you get this dialogue: http://tools.firebright.com/stage/insert_chars.gif That's an editor's dream. Adding an image (image mgmt is very similar to eZ Publish) is also easy, and includes a preview: http://tools.firebright.com/stage/addimage.gif The image names would notmally come up in the box (nothing is loaded) Workflow can be done by section or page, by clicking on the editors (authors in this system), and then selecting +. This is make it so that the page has to pass through that person for publishing when it originates with that particular author -- permissions can be amazingly granular and multi-level -- all point and click... The editor is fantastic and includes all of what most of our clients say is missing (as mentioned previously): http://tools.firebright.com/stage/hotbanana.gif Adding resources is simple: http://tools.firebright.com/stage/hotbanana2.gif This is something you can do in eZ Publish, but it's not quite as intuative. Meta tag management is easy too (not that it matters much anymore): http://tools.firebright.com/stage/hotbanana3.gif The scheduling interface is awesome as well, with point and click simplicity: http://tools.firebright.com/stage/hotbanana4.gif I know that eZ has tried to keep the backend as compatable as possible, which I respect. But I would love it if they had some kind of "advanced backend", even if it were an addon, that included more features. As it is, we have found it quite costly to implement all of these features on eZ (even when it easily supports them), as it has to be done. This is supposed to be constructive criticism, and I'm completely open to suggestions (and rebuffs if you would like). CMS is not a "one size fits all" solution, and I don't think any one system has it, but I would really like to see eZ Publish get a much more customer friendly, less "open source looking" admin interface, and get easier to use out of the gate (I think eZ Systems is onboard, as I've seen a lot of improvement lately -- I'm just throwing my 2c in there). Jonathan Dillon FireBright, Inc. --------- FireBright provides advanced eZ deployment with root access http://www.FireBright.com/
Aleksander Farstad	Wednesday 14 April 2004 1:06:14 am Hi Jonathan, Thank you for very constructive criticism. It is this kind of feedback that help us improve. You do also have many important points. Usability is one of the highest prioritized parts of our future development, and we admit it has not been that high priority this far in the 3.x development, as general framework development has. Our goal is to make everybody accomplish more, both the ones using the system (editors, wemasters, users) and the ones building the system. We do know there are lots of things we can, and should do here, and we have started the process, both with the admin interface project as you mentioned and by building more tools simplyfying the process of making sites, as you will see from the next 3.4 release with different tools. With usability we also admit that we can not invent everything ourselves, but look at systems the users are used to and that does this very well, both competitors and others, like windows and Mac. But I also need to mention one other basic philosophy of our development, which is openness. eZ publish is build following open standards, like XML. It is also a thrue content management system separating design from content. Thus some of the functionlality you mention above we will into implement as standard in eZ publish, like being able to choose fonts and colors in the editor. These features are design and should be controlled by the designers. The largest part of our work with the OE was to remove functionality so we could follow the prinziples of content management and get a clean XML.There are possibilt to integrate such editors into eZ publish, but then you would need to break these prinziples, for example by storing everything in HTML.This does of course make the challenge bigger. So to conclude, we are focusing on usability, and know there are lots of things we can improve. Our main goal is to have a clean intuitive interface, but still follow the open standards and separation of design and content.And we appreciate such contructive critisism, becaus we acknowledge we are not perfect,and this feedback will help us target what the users want. Aleksander
Ole Morten Halvorsen	Wednesday 14 April 2004 5:23:20 am Jonathan, Check out this article by Balazs on changes to the admin interface: http://ez.no/community/news/the_administration_interface_project and this thread http://ez.no/community/forum/suggestions/the_administration_interface_project Ole Senior Software Engineer - Vision with Technology http://www.visionwt.com http://www.omh.cc http://www.twitter.com/omh eZ Certified Developer http://ez.no/certification/verify/358441 http://ez.no/certification/verify/272578
Jonathan Dillon-Hayes	Wednesday 14 April 2004 9:35:20 am Ole and Aleksander - Thanks for your replies (and quick ones at that). Let me add some more functionality that I think is a little strange and aren't related to markup but usability to the list: - when you log into the forums to make a reply, instead of showing me the thread newest to oldest, I only see the original message. Can this be configured, because in a busy forum I don't imagine this works so well. - you can't keep yourself logged in. I think it would be fantastic if there were a simple cookie set with a "(x) keep me logged in until I log myself out" button in the eZ Publish login form. That might also dramatically improve the stickyness of eZ Publish out of the box, as IME many forums customers are lost on their initial return visit if they have login problems No, on to open standards. I was very active in an organization called MACCAWS.org for a while, until I realized that web standards already have enough advocates (and I got more experienced using them). I understand that you need code that validates, and that does make eZ Publish more forward thinking than many other commercial CMS systems (though not all). My problem with web standards is that many times, clients (who are just, after 6 years, starting to "figure out this web stuff") are being asked to accept that things don't work the same way that thought they did. For example, we have a client right now who was shocked (SHOCKED!) that I couldn't just center everything in the xhtml template I was showing him and had to "rebuild" the template (well, I do, we all know how hard pixel perfect cross-platform design is in xhtml). The thing is, out of the box, eZ Publish <i>could</i> be a lot friendlier. Simple things that could be implemented in a couple of minutes, but would make a major difference, would be included custom tags for TM, (C), and (r). Special characters shouldn't be hard to use. Other things I could think of: - including a (xhtml compliant, or better, server-side client sniffing) editor for the forums and other content input locations for - including basic classes in the sample sites (or at <i>least</i> in the OE) that include underlining, strikethrough, and a couple of customizable classes etc - improving (and this one is a biggy) the process of inserting images... it can't be done from the OE per se (it can, but not in an anything close to intuative way). There needs to be some kind of preview, image options, etc - Improving the process of assigning page permissions - Decreasing the page refreshes required to make changes. eZ Publish is hard to use on slow dialup, when you're not in the office - Improving the page view model, so that you can see your directories and files in an intuative directory tree without having to refresh until you click on something - Improving the "slickness" of the interface. eZ Publish is like a tugboat in a harbor full of sailboats in terms of it's "schnazziness" and appeal - Making the shop module configure a little more cleanly for non-European customers (we don't have VAT in the US for example). - IMPORTANT (I'm on a client call RIGHT this second talking about this (and taking a beating)) -- you should be able to publish pages without them showing up in the navigation. Also, improved support out of the box for press areas... I do think that modelling eZ after from of the effective content management systems is a good idea. The thing about CMS is that pretty much anything you could do has been done already. and you can learn from other's mistakes. Some CMS vendors have solved it with Flash (which actually is quite a good use of flash IMHO -- hate it for advertising, but for admin interfaces, it can make up for a LOT of the downsides of XHTML). And it can be embedded in standards compliant documents: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/flashsatay/ Anyways, off track there. Modelling eZ Publish after another successful CMS would dramatically improve the UI. I would really love to help out in any way I can to make these kinds of changes happen. I know they all seem really basic, but it would make the product a lot more enjoyable to use. I'm sure there is more I can add, and I could flesh these ideas out to make more sense, but I also have to get back to work. ;-) That's it! Jonathan --------- FireBright provides advanced eZ deployment with root access http://www.FireBright.com/
K259	Thursday 15 April 2004 6:24:09 am Great Jonathan! :) Just like I would explain it myself ;) Our users also complain about some parts of the GUI(some of the things you mentioned), and eZ systems should also take a look at some of the other CMS-systems around the world to make eZ publish better. One of the things the users and I would like to be rewritten, is the hard way of using images(in other cms-systems you can just drag and drop images from everywhere, but in eZ publish you have to upload one and one picture in an image-class to initiate them as objects(there is an extension here, but I have not tested it), and then add the images as related objects to the page before beeing able to add the images to the input fields in the Online Editor). Pretty much work. We also have had a lot of problems with tags copied and pasted from MS word documents into the editor which not are beeing supported, but then just removed in the text through the eZ-OE (and it's a lot of work for the users to read through every published text to check which tags are beeing removed or not). If we take an example with Digimaker (www.digimaker.no)..in this CMS-system the pageview with functionality is very clean and good. It's possible to choose a publish date and a expire date on every page(runs like procedures and triggers in ms sql server) without have to set up any workflows, and enter the server settings to set up cronjobs(which most of the users are not able to do). I hope eZ publish will follow the possibillites in the v. 5 of Mysql..which supports procedures..so we don't have to use all these php-files as cronjobs (it's very messy and not userfriendly). Another tip is to give us some more info on PHP accellerators which is a "must" when using eZ publish to speed up the system. It would also be great in the admin part, to have the possibillity to alter tables and make some changes without having to go to the mysql prompt. Since there are no extension to validate email before mailing(like the mailman-product does), it would be great to get lists in the adminpart of the subscribers, so that the editors can add subcribers, delete and verify that they shall receive email from the ez p system. A couple of dynamical menues should be integrated through the admin interface on a clean installation (would be great)..so that the users can build sites with the folder-class, article-class and the link class, and get ez up'n going (I know that ez shall be flexible and some users want to make their own menu, but most of the users which have downloaded ez publish don't have the knowledge of coding these things, and therefore there should be a dynamical menu available with some ok classes to use in the default ez publish installation. The ones who don't want this, can just choose to uninstall it ;) Another thing in other CMS-systems is the possibillities of hiding and securing internal pages(intranet pages). This can easily be done on every page on some other CMS-systems I've checked out, but if you want to to this with ez publish, you have to do a very big job to get this up and running. These kind of functions are great and necessary features you have in a good CMS-system. ez publish would be much more interesting for me to use if a default installation had these things integrated ;)