webUI design tweaking

Hi folks, new here. I’ve been playing around with nethserver for a few weeks in my VM lab environment. I’m trying to do some webUI design tweaking, and am quite confused on how the HTML objects are being assigned CSS classes. I’ve done quite a bit of work with PHP, mostly wordpress, as well as some web scrapers and other random small stuff, but this whole “MVC framework” concept is very new to me. Some classes I can search throughout the nethesis directory, and get a general idea of where they are coming from, and how they are assigned, while others appear to be a randomly generated string, or I simply come up empty handed in the search. I spent time reading through the developers documentation, and sifting through code and comments, but have still struggled grasping ahold of how this is done. Sorry for such a newb question, TIA for your help.

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@davidep can you shed some light to help @Dutch here to get some understanding about Servermanager?

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Keep in mind that cockpit may replace nethgui in future.

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Can you be more specific? What is your goal? What do you want to achieve?

Markus is right: our efforts are directed towards a new Server Manager implementation based on Cockpit. This is where to start:

@alefattorini is editing a video record of a Cockpit crash course where Edoardo and Giacomo explain the basics of the new Server Manager

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Awesome David, Thank you. That is funny, because I was actually looking around at other web UI server managers and fell in love with cockpit. It has a sleek design and it’s functionality seems to be on point too. In regards to what I was trying to achieve with webui tweaking, I come from a web design background, so giving everything a new look, is just kind of my “thing”. Maybe just give some of the dashboard widgets a new feel, and make a more mobile friendly menu. I can probably accomplish what I’d like, using classes already in place, but I was just confused on how these classes were assigned. I’ve installed cockpit onto my nethserver VM and look forward to experimenting with it.

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@Dutch
I would love to see ‘community involvement’ with the cockpit userinterface. I suggest you contact @giacomo and @edoardo_spadoni and join their efforts in getting cockpit ready for production.

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This sounds interesting, however I wouldn’t go in that direction as said above.

I’m curious to hear your “newbie” opinion. After playing a bit with the new cockpit-based project tell us your impressions.

One of our goals is to ease the job of the frontend developer, making him productive with HTML JavaScript and the Patternfly CSS framework. What do you think? Are we on the right track?

Another question: how did you find the NethServer project?

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Hi folks, thank you all for the info and motivation. I finally got around to dropping cockpit on my Nethserver VM, and started getting a feel for things. As I familiarize myself with how things work, I will definitely get in contact with more people from the dev team, although I must admit, this would be my first time contributing to an open source project in this manner. I’ve been a independent web designer on the side for years.

@davidep As for how I came across Nethserver. I work for a small MSP, as a systems/network admin, and my boss had mentioned his interest in utilizing a “virtual appliance”(I hate this term, but my boss used to be a car salesman so he often gets caught up in these marketing phrases) to replace hardware routers, at some of the locations we have contracts with. Anyways, after extensive research into options, their functionality, scalability, and intuitiveness, I decided to move forward with nethserver.

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Thank you for introducing yourself. I’m eager to listen to your impressions!

curious to read your impression on cockpit and our new server-manager

  • documentation

https://nethserver.github.io/nethserver-cockpit/

  • sources

Well, after a few days of snooping around cockpit and hacking away, I must say, this is a million times easier than nethGUI. I was able to understand how to deploy my own module solely based on a bit of reverse engineering, something I was unable to do with NethGUI. I spent hours reading docs on NethGUI and was still confused(Hence me coming here). Now I just need to think of something useful to make for nethserver. lol

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My sins were forgiven :innocent:

It’s 8.30 am and you made my day!

Thank you man I wish you all the best!

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We try to collaborate each other in this community, so if you are looking for inputs, tricks and helps on development, you should simply ask to the @dev_team, for other kind of help you have also the @support_team

That’s not fair, you just need to read the code to understand…Or I penetrated in the mind of @davidep.

Well if you want to do something useful, ping us :smiley:

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WoW… this means I can (a)buse your skillz to get a few highly wanted (edu) applications ready as NethServer module? expect to have your spare time filled for the next 10 years or so… :rofl::heart_eyes::hugs:

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Thanks for the feedback man. This was one of our biggest aim, happy to see first signs of appreciation

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