Re-design and simplify admin area. Let's discuss

Hi, i make an admin theme for nopcommerce,

you can see at https://www.codester.com/items/1569/nadmin-nopcommerce-admin-theme.

This is good news, we take it for granted knowing where things are in the back-end, and forget what it's like with "fresh eyes".

my suggestion is Wizards - initial setup Wizards, security configuration Wizards, whatever. I have tried to manage multiple sites and it is time consuming, I've tried building default settings, and even a plugin was attempted, but it's always a "fight". And it's always funny introducing a shop owner to his admin as you know they just won't get it for a while...

I've been interested in Ansible and Puppet for a while, and find a direct relation with ecommerce setups.

I haven't given it any more thought than that, but I have considered creating an initial store setup wizard, and someway of creating a settings map.

and great news about vNext, I agree, It creates complications, and It great to know where we will be. Even if things change, I'm sure the decision will be correct for nopCommerce.

All the best...

Hi Marc,

marc wrote:
Good idea! Thanks! We've been thinking about settings that will allow a store owner to specify whether some functionality (or property) should be enabled (e.g. recurring payments for products). Once it's done we can implement such wizard(s) that could be used during nopCommerce installation (or displayed when visiting the admin area for the first time).

marc wrote:
Please note that we're going to introduce the new design and simplify admin area in the next version (3.80). But we won't move to vNext in version 3.80. Most probably we'll do it in the next release 4.00 (in this case we'll skip 3.90 to indicate that it's a major release)

Patryk has suggested quite interesting idea. Please let me reply here (as we discuss re-design and simplification in this topic):

Very good idea. Thanks! What we planned and discussed here and on nopdevdays'15 is that we should add some hints for store owners when he/she visits the admin area for the first time(s). Some kind of popup tutorials. Screencasts could also be very helpful and interesting feature. The only issue here is that producing of screencasts is quite time-consuming task

Acl is something that works very well, but I find clients get confused. It's easy to reduce the menu options with Acl - I use limited accounts, say to only do ordering and customers but no products. If there is an initial store set up, then adding template roles somehow, and not just choosing the main admin and ending up with the default name 'John'.

Reporting is something that comes up - not that the reporting is wrong, but in bigger stores they need more custom reports, i.e. to split up in the warehouse, or add images to reports to send as pdf etc. Adding new reports to the system is relatively easy, but still seems like a hack. The MessageToken system is good (used to customize emails) and it would be good if it could be applied to reporting as well, so report templates could be made to customize the reports.

I would also like to comment that the current admin is so fast, it's the best it's ever been and is more than comfortable for developing. Things were much more time consuming working with previous versions, but the improvements have been phenomenal in my opinion.

Hi Andrei,

What do you think about adding a tab with for example "Data Exchange Center" where you will have all documents which we can import/export to nop. It will be a convenient solution, the problem arises only when someone will want to export some products not all of them.

Best regards,
Patryk

nop4you wrote:
Hi Patryk,

To what page do you suggest to add this tab? What will be the difference with the current import/export functionality (e.g. on the product list page)? Please provide more info

Hi,

I thought about totally new page in for example Configuration -> Import/Export. Pluses? All exportable/importable data in one place. For example user who is migrating from PrestaShop to nopCommerce has 10 files to import. Now, he must enter the products list -> import file, enter the category list -> import file, enter the customer list -> import file. In my idea, he will enter the special page. (50% time save on this operations).

Customers ----------- Import ------ Export
Categories ---------- Import ------ Export
etc.

I hope this cleared this idea a little bit.

Best regards,
Patryk

Thanks, Patryk! I've just created a separate work item for this task

Please stop using kendo UI. Its look is not good.