2.10 GUI - Suggestions

Phillipe said let’s have some discussion on the New Gui - it will be too late to change things when 2.10 goes final - therefore I would encourage anyone who has comment to make it now so it can be considered by the developers. It does seem that there is some apathy with this Beta release, there appear to be fewer people than normal testing, or is it exactly what everyone wants so there is nothing to say?

I have to say that since I have been testing my opinion has changed on the new layout and I am beginning to like it more and more. Adding the drop-downs on mouse-over really did add some polish to the whole thing and, with use, I have found the headings are very logical and finding things is very easy.

Some small points:

  • On the Trunk Module would it be possible for the Trunk Listing Box on the right to expand to avoid truncation of longer descriptions as do the boxes on inbound and outbound routes?

  • It seems to me that some of the GUI maintenance items in Advanced Options are no longer appropriate with the new layout - perhaps some editing is required there.

  • I would like to have the ability to put my logo somewhere on the pages. I certainly don’t want to have to remove the developers logos to do this, any ideas where it could go?

  • The ability to easily add tabs at the top would be great, there has been some information on this in Phillipe’s Blog. Personally I would really like buttons for quick access to the Status Page and Asterisk Info but knowing that one mans meat is another mans poison … those sorts of things just have to be optional!

Come on everyone lets get some discussion going, even if its to say you like it as it is, an awful lot of effort has been put into this by the developers so I am sure they would appreciate hearing from us.

We are working with 2.10 and we have a hard time with many of the icons and text colors they seem to blend in with a white background. Setting up the directory today when adding extensions I could not see the button and just happen to move my mouse over it.

thanks for the feedback so far,

there are some advanced options which probably need to be removed, we’ll try to go through some of that to clean things up.

As far as the tabs, have you tried to play with the freepbx_menu.conf file, you can do what you want with that including getting things like the dashboard to be it’s own button.

We’ll look at the other feedback to see what we may be able to do, keep it coming, thanks!

Phillipe

I copied the template to freepbx_menu.conf and have tried adding a category without result. I think perhaps my syntax is wrong. Could you give a brief explanation that will point me in the right direction so I can experiment?

you also have to enable it in advanced settings.

If you did that and it did not work, post what you tried to do and what you expected and I’ll be glad to have a look.

The following is what I have on one system to get the Dashboard as a top level menu item:

[dashboard]
category=FreePBX Stats

As long as there are no other menu items in that category, it will automatically become a button vs. a pulldown. As soon as you put more than one items in a category it becomes a pull down.

Note you can also have a special category, “Favorites” which will always appear on the far right, the others are sorted alphabetically.

Great Phillipe, now works, I should have realised it needed to be enabled somewhere. Thanks.

Once Module Admin has done its stuff and upgraded or installed a module it returns to the start page which is a bit confusing, could it go to a task completed or something like that page?

Can the FreePBX frog at the top left be changed to go back to the Main FreePBX Status page ??

There is already a FreePBX frog at the bottom, and it’s common that the top left icon usually goes to a ‘main’ or ‘home’ page area.

the frog is actually a configurable link which spawns a new window/tab to what ever it points to. It’s possible to set it to the system status page but it will still spawn a new link.

One thing we’ve discussed is to put the dashboard as it’s own button at the top. The only issue is one of the limited real estate up there though personally having a top level menu item for that is my vote.

You can change it yourself if you want either way, I don’t recall the link but a few blogs back it was described how you can take advantage of freebpx_menu.conf to completely re-configure the top however you want it, including adding top level buttons for dashboard, CDRs if you want, etc. If you are someone who uses a very wide screen, you may be happy to put more stuff up there…

I actually used freepbx_menu.conf to add a System Button at the top that has three items on the dropdown, the homepage, asterisk info and the javassh for root logins. This is all very personal but its great to be able to do it so easily after you enable menu.conf in Advanced Settings. Here is the contents of my menu.conf:

[dashboard]
category=System

[asteriskinfo]
category=System

[javassh]
category=System

Is there any way to get the “Setup” and “Tools” menu back with freepbx_menu.conf? I noticed the menu structure can assign a “type” to each menu entry e.g. type=Setup or type=Tools but no mention on how to use this or display it.

there is no concept of Setup and Tools in 2.10 anymore so no, any of that left in there is relics left over.

You could redefine all the categories if you just wanted setup and tools though and just have two tabs on the top for everything…

Upon getting FreePBX 2.11 running (Incredible Pi 3.11) I immediately saw the message about setting an e-mail address for update notification. I went looking for it and didn’t find it, so hit the web. As this has changed with the recent updates, it wasn’t where people said it was (new version).

I finally re-read the message, and went hunting around the Module Admin page but didn’t find it right away. The fact that it is hiding behind the big Frog Shield image simply meant that I wasn’t seeing it. This image is more like a logo, and that is what I thought it was, more of an advertisement.

Personally I find the fact that a UI element is behind a large picture is incoherent with the rest of interface. I’m looking for words in text when I go looking for a setting. Perhaps you could add some text under/next to this Online Update image?