Welcome to the X4 Project Discussion group.

[cPanelTomGreen]

My name is Tom Green and I'm the product owner for this development effort.

We are taking a very different approach to developing X4, in that we are going to be developing it with community involvement.

I will be periodically posting threads about the the area or feature we are working on just before we start working that feature. We will be posting designs and screen shots to threads here. We would like our forum users to give us feedback on our work as it progresses.

As we proceed with development of X4, we will be releasing the development build of the theme as a plugin in approximately 4 week intervals.

I will be posting a few articles next week with more details about the project.

I'm looking forward to meeting and engaging you all in the coming weeks as we kick off this development effort.

Tom Green
Product Owner
Team: Code Ninjas

 

[sirghayoor]

Thanks, and good to see you working in the sites. i appreciate you to publish this topic on your site, i hope that your project will be good.

 

[Astral God]

Great, but thank you to consider all the comments that have been made on the new WHM!

 

[monarobase]

Great news, can't wait to get an idea of what this new theme will be like

 

[JamesThompson]

Hello all, I have put together a small snapshot/preview of the potential X4 theme/plugin:




Some Key notes:
- Fully responsive intended to work on desktops, tablets and mobile devices
- "Toned" down color scheme to allow significantly easier/ more flexible branding
- A strong focus on useability including improved support for multiple languages and keyboard functionality.
Plenty more...

 

[k21_karan]

Looks Great.

Hello all, I have put together a small snapshot/preview of the potential X4 theme/plugin:

View attachment 13411


Some Key notes:
- Fully responsive intended to work on desktops, tablets and mobile devices
- "Toned" down color scheme to allow significantly easier/ more flexible branding
- A strong focus on useability including improved support for multiple languages and keyboard functionality.
Plenty more...

 

[nibb]

Looks great.

How about a news display in the top which the users after reading one time can click on X to close it. Simple java script could do that.

I think there should be a priority for announcements, or this could be done the first time the user logs into cPanel. Currently the news are just a small link in the top left corner and I notice most people never read this, they go directly to what they want and so they miss important things about their services.

For providers sending news and announcements right in the face of the customer is important. I would also try not to completely fill all empty space so providers can add their own stuff into it without making it look to jammed. Some side bar or the top should be left blank for customization, just like it shows in the images now.

The fluid display is necessary today in a world of tablets, phones and of course huge computers monitors, so that is a good approach.

 

[AndrewH.]

Looks great.

How about a news display in the top which the users after reading one time can click on X to close it. Simple java script could do that.

I think there should be a priority for announcements, or this could be done the first time the user logs into cPanel. Currently the news are just a small link in the top left corner and I notice most people never read this, they go directly to what they want and so they miss important things about their services.

For providers sending news and announcements right in the face of the customer is important. I would also try not to completely fill all empty space so providers can add their own stuff into it without making it look to jammed. Some side bar or the top should be left blank for customization, just like it shows in the images now.

Our current incarnation of x4 uses the top area for cPanel warnings, I've attached a copy of some earlier mockups we did to give you an idea what I mean by this.



I'm unsure how much tinkering you do with cPanel itself but in x4 we've made news much easier to access and control. I know previously it was just taking all the news sources and dumping them at once, this has changed. We have the news on the right side since we felt that any user who is not a reseller will currently have nothing else on that side. We've also made it a lot easier to add your own content with Bootstrap'ish style classes to generate content boxes. Ex: A box in cPanel now has a "cellbox" class, within that a "cellbox-header" and "cellbox-body" which create almost every content container in the cPanel index.



One of the other comments we received was that anyone who had a reseller's toolbar and a large number of user accounts associated with it would have a slow load time. We are aiming at fixing that in x4 as well using ajax.

 

[cenourinha]

Great to know that cPanel user-interface will be responsive and it will be possible for us to use Bootstrap style classes.

 

[geck]

That looks great, how will plugins developed against x3 work with this new system?

 

[Liam W]

When will it be available for beta usage? Looks nice!

 

[jakesully]

When will it be available for beta usage? Looks nice!

i think they said it will be for testing at release 11.36 of cpanel/whm.

 

[cPanelTomGreen]

We will be looking at how plugins will be supported in a future release of x4.

Our intention is to try to make the transition to x4 as painless as possible, however, we have not yet fully defined the x4 implementation, so it premature for me to provide exact details at this point.

If you have specific areas of concern, I would love to hear about them and we can try to take them into consideration in the redesign.

 

[cPanelTomGreen]

We are anticipating a first Alpha release at the end of January.

This release will include only the home page and maybe one or two small applications showing the direction we are taking.

We will be releasing monthly updates to x4 after the first release with additional applications moved into x4.

The releases will remain in "ALPHA" stage until we have moved enough of the critical functionality into the product for it to be usable without reverting to x3. At that point we will transition to the "BETA" stage in which we will be refining the features based on feedback.

 

[PCZero]

I am confused a tad I think. Will this plug in address JUST the customers cPanel interface or will it also address the new (and horrible) WHM interface? I am using WHM 11.34.1 (6) and that WHM interface is horrid, but the custom skinned interface I have for the cPanel interface has not changed and still works fine. I guess I am confused as to what it is this plug in is addressing.

 

[AndrewH.]

It's a cPanel standalone theme, so if you were using x3 before you will have the option to use x4 now by installing the plugin. This doesn't alter the WHM UI.

 

[PCZero]

Well that sucks... Not that you are building a new cPanel UI, that is fine. I use X3 branded to my hosting business and it works 100% the way it should and it needs no updates what-so-ever IMHO. The new WHM UI however is absolutely horrible. It is so bad that it is actually a downgrade in useability over the the previous version. I was directed to this thread as what was supposedly a fix to that issues but alas it isn't. Do we have ay idea when we will be able to get rid of the clunky new WHM UI and get back to the much cleaner, simpler, and easier to use previous version? If we could at least get rid of those big old clunky boxes for each operation in the main pane and could go back to the clean smaller icons with better contrast text it would be a huge improvement. Seems to me that this would merely be a matter of a skin and maybe as simple as css depend on how good the programmers are thet designed the thing.

 

[Indianets]

I really wish cPanel give a dime to WHM too. When it comes to modification/modernization, all attention goes to cPanel interface and the same is being repeated this time. I have not seen a single feature request or thread about improvement of X3 interface in long time, still it is good to move forward and develop it.

But, please also look into the other interface which a SysAdmin has to use most of the time after SSH and needs to be good and happening to keep the productivity at great level. Not to forget, there is a highly voted Feature Request too and no words from cPanel about the same.

 

[cPanelTomGreen]

The current schedule looks like the first ALPHA will be available for testing in early February. This release will be limited to the home page improvements and will be made available to test our our concepts for the home page and the installer/uninstaller.

The goal after the first ALPHA release is to release every 4 weeks with both improvements to the functionality we release previously as well as more of the sections/features added in each release.

We will be posting regular updates about what we are working on each 2 week period after the first APLHA is out to you all to try.

 

[cPanelTomGreen]

If you have specific requests for changes to WHM, please feel free to submit them to cPanel Feature Requests