Genuine: The New Magnolia GUI
On this page we will document and collect all information about the new Magnolia Admin Central GUI (codenamed GenUIne).
About the project
Some information about the project.
Scope
The Genuine project covers the following intentions (prioritized):
- Technology (back-end): introduce a standardized, customizable and extensible technology for creating the next generation of the Admin Central UI
- Usability: improve Magnolia back-end's usability and user-experience
- Technology (front-end): we also try to introduce a technology that better supports developers building fully AJAX-enabled websites
Goals & Intentions
The primary goal of this project is to ease development and maintenance of the Magnolia back-end to make it more robust, more customizable and less error prone when changes are applied.
In short the targets are:
- ease-of-development
- extensibility
- customization
- usability
- effectiveness & efficiency
- error robustness
- satisfaction ("joy-of-use")
For a more detailed list, see the analysis page.
Roadmap
The project is separated into two distinct trails that we will work on in parallel. The first trail is the one about interface and interaction design (in the following referred to as "interface trail"), the other one is about the utilized technologies (referred to as "technology trail").
The interface trail will be developed according to the so called Usability Engineering Process Model, which basically separates the development of user interfaces related projects into different project phases (like analysis, concept/design, evaluation, implementation etc.). See the links below for the documentation of each of those phases.
From the technological point of view the project operates in a very critical area as there are many potential technologies out there which evolve and change very fast. Thus, we at first have to carefully consider different approaches that are accepted to be "future-proofed" and meet our requirements. Regarding this, the different approaches that we will keep track of are:
- JSF based user interface, an all-in-one approach
- Webservice based approach which allows adopting various, completely decoupled front-end technologies, e.g. JavaScript based
Both of them possibly require integration technologies that we will take a look on like XForms, JSON, etc. Informations for each technology evaluated are collected on the pages linked below.
Milestones
Interface trail milestones:
- Monday, 21st of January: Presentation: analysis (current status, tasks, requirements), concept (iteration 1), preview: design drafts I
- Presentation: design drafts II (3 case studies including variants), concept (iteration 2, prioritized features)
- Discussion: semi-functional mockup, early prototypes; merge with technology trail
- Discussion: "face-lift" design (iteration I) applied to existing UI concept
- Presentation: final concept (iteration III)
- Discussion: design (iteration II) applied to new UI concept
- Presentation: final design (iteration III)
- Implementation: interface design implementation
Technology trail milestones:
- Prototyping: technology review, technology selection, "warm-up", early prototypes (integration JSF)
- Discussion: requirements catalog, prioritized features: must-have, nice-to-have, etc.
- Discussion: prototypes for both approaches
- Presentation: decision on technology
- Presentation: existing GUI implemented with new technology
- Discussion: review implementation
- Implementation: new GUI
Meeting Protocols
- Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008: Presentation: analysis (current status, tasks, requirements), concept (iteration 1)
- Monday, February 18th, 2008: Presentation: concept (overview), first design drafts
- Wednesday, February 20th, 2008: Discussion with Philipp (general process for project, features)
- Friday, February 22nd, 2008: Discussion (concept)
Links
Following, you can find a collection of pages that cover all informations of the Genuine project.
Design Trail
Technology Trail
