Welcome to the WHM User Interface discussion group.

[cPanelTomGreen]

Welcome to the WHM Improvements Discussion area. We would like for this thread to be focused on User Interface improvements to WHM.

Some history and background:

WHM has grown organically over the last dozen major releases. Some parts of the interface were reasonably well designed, others are very difficult to use.

In early 2012, the User Interface team decided to take a stab at incrementally improving the WHM interface. We spent a few months reworking some of the color scheme and navigation features as well as other specific issues.

Several consideration were taken into account:

• Users were starting to try to access functionality using mobile devices, but were very challenged on many of the pages.
• There were many requests for better keyboard support.
• There were many requests for localization of WHM.
• There was a lot of feedback over the years that the application was not really tuned to customer support scenarios.

Additionally, when we looked at the third party themes for WHM, we couldn't find any that worked on the then 11.32 version.

We concluded, rightly or wrongly that we should just replace the current theme with our new one addressing some of the concerns identified above.

After our release of 11.34 changes to WHM Improvements, we realized that some of the changes were not as well received as we hope they would be.

I decided to put together this forum thread to start collecting information on the issues our customers were finding both with our change set from 11.34 and in WHM in general.

Please feel free to add threads for issue you or your customers have identified with WHM. I will monitor this forum regularly, let you all know what changes we are considering for WHM and as we get fixes for both recent and long standing issues, I'll update you to when these changes are coming in a release. From time to time we may also open up our design discussions on specific rewrites and get your feedback early in the development process.

 

[Indianets]

Finally! Great decision and All the best. :D

I would be sharing what I feel to be changed/revamped and I hope follow members will do the same. Thank you Tom for taking the initiative. The first thing which comes to mind is, it should have a look and feel of cPanel X4 as both will be used side-by-side.

 

[cPanelTomGreen]

I'm with you on syncing up the changes between x4 and WHM. We have that in the plans, but that has not been prioritized yet. Ill create a thread for this here with some more details.

 

[ktalk]

Hi,

I'd like to see the all WHM statistical information displayed in 24 hour time not 12 hour time. For example, when clicking on the Email Tab in WHM, to see the stats for Mail Delivery Reports, Mail Stats, View Sent Summary, View Relayers, etc, the time for all the above displayed is in 12 hour mode. I'd like to see these things set in 24 hour mode.

The only things that are in 24 hour time mode are the current time/date and the mail statistics for the amount of emails sent/received on the server at the time!

Thanks

 

[simonas]

Hello, Tom,

I have posted this thread some time ago: http://forums.cpanel.net/f5/naming-mistake-344562.html

Qoute:

Hi, on 11.38 WHM
there is a menu option titled:

Show Active and Inactive Accounts

But it actually displays Active Domains / Inactive domains.

Another thing that i don't like:

If you have saved login username/password for WHM (in browser), they will be filled in the Basic cPanel & WHM Setup on The AIM username and AIM password.

So if you click Save Changes without looking your root or another username login info will be saved as AIM login too. I haven't studied if that could be security issue ,but it certainly does not look right.

Thanks

 

[Infopro]

Hello, Tom,

I have posted this thread some time ago: http://forums.cpanel.net/f5/naming-mistake-344562.html

Qoute:


Another thing that i don't like:

If you have saved login username/password for WHM (in browser), they will be filled in the Basic cPanel & WHM Setup on The AIM username and AIM password.

So if you click Save Changes without looking your root or another username login info will be saved as AIM login too. I haven't studied if that could be security issue ,but it certainly does not look right.

Thanks

Hi simonas, this thread isn't really the best place for bug reports. If you suspect an issue with cPanel you can open a ticket directly from within your WHM to Technical Support. If you think you've found a defect in the product itself, please feel free to open a ticket about that, here:
http://go.cpanel.net/bugs

I've opened an internal case #80793 on this myself this morning to see what I can find out.

Thanks.

 

[rachelm]

My vote is for some sort of system allowing us to make our own themes and let the theme devs on the web take care of this for you.

Problem atm is all the changes you guys have made have really removed any real options for making a WHM theme. All you can really do is change images and css but you can't change the fundamental layout of WHM itself.

We planned (and still do) on making a WHM theme that doesn't need the left hand command menu, but under the current setup that window is literally required, WHM crashes and burns without it (the interface, not the backend).

So making it a little easier to work with and configurable would pretty much take care of the issue as all the theme makers out there would be free to put their own spin on things and you can bet they'll come up with something much better.

Actually they already did, that's how you guys got the current WHM theme hehe. Yes, I'm old enough enough to remember the guy who made the theme before you bought it lol. I still shudder at the old mostly text only themes.

Need to go back to that format and give theme devs options. Changing the style sheet might spruce up the colors but as far as functionality goes it's too limiting. We'd love to make a theme that doesn't have or need a side menu and instead has an organized top loading menu, thus leaving the entire width of the screen for displaying data (like list accounts) and what not.

Eventually we'll do it anyways, but we don't have time to figure out your new theme methods yet (well we've half figured it out but no time to put that much work into just a theme).

 

[AndrewH.]

We planned (and still do) on making a WHM theme that doesn't need the left hand command menu, but under the current setup that window is literally required, WHM crashes and burns without it (the interface, not the backend).

There's some prototyping internally to get this sorted out and moved to a better, single page template based system(We don't like iframes much either ). Right now the biggest issue is a lot of WHM pages are generated on the perl side, so we're converting them to template toolkit pages during this process.

 

[electric]

I just noticed this thread. My opinion is that cpanel should include a basic WHM theme only. The current one is fine. It's ugly but functional.

Then cpanel needs to completely separate back-end functionality from display/design side. So this way, the thousands of web application user interface designers can tackle the "problem" of making a great WHM theme that works.

In the end, you'll eventually end up with a few common WHM themes that are sold and managed by 3rd party vendors. If someone wants to save $ they can just use the default theme included with WHM.

But as it stands, like rachelm mentioned... the current system of skinning is ridiculous. It is simply not practical.

Once cpanel completely separates design/look/feel side from the back-end business side.. then let the design professionals take over and they'll produce some nice themes. Perhaps you (cpanel) can offer a competition with a nice prize or something as a reward. (The prize being the recommended theme with direct links to the theme company's website from cpanel.net.)

Make sense?

TL/DR; Cpanel, please stick to what you are good at. You're good at back-end stuff. You're not good at front-end design stuff. So, modify the WHM template/theme system and make a total separation between business and presentation logic, and then allow professional UI designers to create and sell their own themes.

My 2 cents.