The foundations of a new UX for cPanel

[cPanelAdamF]

Hey everyone,

cPanel is looking for comment/feedback on a new direction for its upcoming User Experience refresh. While simple, elegant and minimal, the new user interface work will eventually provide a much "closer to the metal" and thus more powerful way of theming/branding cPanel for our customers, much more coherent experiences for end-users to achieve their goals, and screen-size responsiveness so that cPanel looks great no matter the device you use to access it.

That's where we're headed with it and we're taking small foundational steps in that direction by applying what we've learned from previous UI endeavors directly to the product as it stands right now. Expect to see a developer-preview of this theme available in coming releases.

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Have a peek and let us know what you think. We'll be watching the comment thread here, but if you'd prefer to let us know what you think directly, send us an email at [email protected].

 

[cenourinha]

It looks great. Love the new icons design and "bootstrap" style. Keep up the good work

 

[cPanelAdamF]

We're actually getting pretty serious about adopting Twitter Bootstrap 3 deeply into the product. For a UI Toolkit, we're quite happy with what's its capable of and we've definitely heard all of the feature requests for it.

 

[chrismfz]

Why not use a style like WHMCS' admin frontend ? Everything in movable tabs (even the content in left)
with minimize options and why not resizable too (ok that's too much) ?

Also why not a "Favourite" tab on the top which we can drag the icons we need most in the order we like.

 

[cPanelAdamF]

ultimately we'd like to get to this kind of an experience, yes. Right now we're concentrating on building the foundations which we'll later come back and build these ideas onto.

 

[electric]

I would like to see the entire "email" management system in cpanel changed. It happens frequently that a customer doesn't know they have a forwarder AND a mailbox... or they want only a forwarder but they also create a mailbox because they don't understand there is a difference. It's confusing to non-technical users what features/functionality is enabled or possible for any given email address.

So instead of having separate pages for email account management, forwarders, auto-responders, filters, etc.. consider that the users just want to manage their "email address".

I think it would make more sense to have a single "email addresses" page that lists ALL different email addresses, regardless of if it's a forwarder, mailbox, auto-responder, or whatever. Then customer selects an email address to edit, and sees a page for the selected email address that shows whatever different options are enabled for it -- mailbox, forwarder, autoresponder, filter, etc..

So we have a single page for :

[email protected]
- List of forwarders in a text box (and save ability, so they can update just be entering/removing emails from the box)
- List of autoresponders
- Mailbox (enabled/disabled) and then if enabled, the usual pw reset, how to cofigure, quota, etc..
- List of filters

The idea is that the customer can see an entire overview of the selected "email address" and manage its features and functionality all from that single overview page.

I think this would be much better than splitting up all the different email functions into multiple pages.

Thanks.



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Another idea is to make the horizontal navigation section a configurable list of "favorites". So it would work like the bookmarks bar in Chrome. You can enable the bookmarks bar, and then add bookmarks to your favorite sites, so they are all quickly clickable.

There should be a way to drag or "bookmark" any page in the cpanel, and then it is added to this horizontal menu "bookmarks bar", just like a browser.

 

[cPanelAdamF]

These are great ideas, Electric. Please submit them to cPanel Feature Requests so that we can get community consensus on them.

 

[fibreserv]

great

This cpanel looks great and is there still going to be options to customise it?

 

[cPanelAdamF]

Re: great

This cpanel looks great and is there still going to be options to customise it?

Yes, absolutely. We may move away from the current branding/theming mechanisms found in X3 towards something simpler and more powerful, but YES, we are definitely working to provide better customization and more powerful styling options.

 

[WireNine]

Adam I can't say enough good things about the new UI it is ages ahead of the current one, how soon can we get our hands on this? The coding & design looks beautiful. The current X3 customizations are a pain to deal with.

 

[cPanelAdamF]

Adam I can't say enough good things about the new UI it is ages ahead of the current one, how soon can we get our hands on this? The coding & design looks beautiful. The current X3 customizations are a pain to deal with.

A pre-release alpha will be available in 11.42, which is coming out at the end of Jan 2014. Resellers will be able to set accounts to try out the new Paper Lantern theme but there will be some known issues. For example, screen size responsiveness will be limited at first and you won't be able to brand the interface at first. Those things will return with future releases, though, so stay tuned!

edit: release date and grammer

 

[cPanelKenneth]

To add to Adam's statement, cPanel & WHM version 11.42 is now available in both EDGE and CURRENT tiers. Paper Lantern is included in 11.42. We welcome your feedback on it.

 

[cPanelAdamF]

Here's how to play with Paper Lantern:

For non-reseller accounts:
Contact your reseller and request to have your account set to the Paper Lantern theme.

For Resellers (and those with reseller privileges)
Log into WHM and choose Modify an Account from the sidebar. Select an account from the account selection areas and click Modify. Choose Paper Lantern from the 'cPanel Theme' selection box on the account and then click save. If the user is currently logged in, instruct them to log out and log back in again to see the new theme.

 

[urgido]

waiting for custom options for this.

 

[cPanelAdamF]

waiting for custom options for this.

They are coming ;-)

 

[WebHostPro]

I love it! Can we have a way to choose the top used icons and have them at the top under most popular or a term we choose?

It would be very helpful to new users to be able to find the most used options right at the top.

 

[chrismfz]

Many users don't :D (There is a panic thread in WHT about the new theme)

@cPanelAdamF
Is this possible in the future to have an option in ACL to let users choose among themes ?
For example let users inside cPanel choose between x3 or paper lantern or something else too.
(We should control the available list too, I don't want someone from x3mail to switch to x3 for example)


We can force globally from package editor a new theme, but there is a chance many users won't like it.

It should be an option from inside cPanel -not WHM- to let users choose too.
In Feature Manager perhaps it could be doable.

 

[Infopro]

Hardly a panic thread, IMO.

@DWHS, Not sure there's a need for that, the search at top works great.

@chrismfz, I would think that will be an obvious option. It's not now as this is still a very early release.

 

[WebHostPro]

@DWHS, Not sure there's a need for that, the search at top works great.

The search at the top really doesn't work great for new users. When you have extreme newbies they wouldn't even know what to search for.

By having the important options like wordpress, site builder, email, ect.. right on top that will help guide them to the common options.

 

[cPanelAdamF]

@cPanelAdamF
Is this possible in the future to have an option in ACL to let users choose among themes ?
For example let users inside cPanel choose between x3 or paper lantern or something else too.
(We should control the available list too, I don't want someone from x3mail to switch to x3 for example)


We can force globally from package editor a new theme, but there is a chance many users won't like it.

It should be an option from inside cPanel -not WHM- to let users choose too.
In Feature Manager perhaps it could be doable.

We've actually contemplated doing exactly this. There would need to be some basic things there to actually do it:

• As a mail-only user, I should NOT be able to promote myself beyond my permission level by changing my theme
• As a cPanel user whose reseller is not willing to participate in the Paper Lantern alpha, I should not have the option to change my theme
• As a cPanel user whose reseller IS participating in the Paper Lantern alpha, I should have the option to change my theme. I should only see the themes that my reseller specifies.
• As a cPanel User whose reseller IS participating in the Paper Lantern alpha AND my reseller specifies only one theme available to me, I should NOT be able to change my theme.
• As a Reseller, by default my users should NOT be able to change to a different theme than the one I set for them.
• As a Reseller, I want to configure a package such that all users with that package have the same set of themes available to them.
• As a Reseller, I want to specify the themes my users should have access to on a user-by-user basis

I miss anything?