Hello Joe,

I have been looking at the roadmap and there is nothing about improving usability in the Admin Pages.

As you know , I think that Mojoportal is a unusually solid and complete cms.

But I can't say the same about usability of the Admin pages. I think that if you pursue to increase its popularity you should invest some time in improving this area (and I'm aware of  how valuable is your time in a so big project with a so small number of developers).

Working in the weaknesses of Mojoportal rather than in the strenghts will result in a better balanced app.

Balance its not a goal in itself: Popularity  should be a goal for Mojoportal.  And, in my opinion, improving usability in the admin area is the key that will provide better results in terms of new users.

Users evaluating Mojoportal always have a long list of CMS to try, and they should find easily the way of doing thing, or they will discard a wonderful CMS even before they can appreciate how solid and well architected it is.

Best regards,

Matías Molleja

Hello Joe,

Thanks for your kind reply.

I think that new users are a little lost in the admin UI.(I'm myself a recent user and have these impressions fresh in my mind). This is the kind of problem an expert user find difficult to see. For example, once the user enters a concrete admin page he looses the reference of where he is in the global system (except for the breadcrumb). And if he wants to navigate to a diferent area usually needs to use the breadcrumb or go back in the browser.

This type of "confusion" or "lack of global view" could be eliminated by the adoption of this two design patterns:

http://designinginterfaces.com/Two-Panel_Selector

http://designinginterfaces.com/Global_Navigation

I understand this is is not trivial, hence the title of this post :).

I think too that keeping the mix between "Frontend" and "Admin Pages" makes difficult the adoption of this kind of big changes. As a long term goal I would try to separate two different applications:

- One for the frontend with end visitors of the site in mind.

- One for the backend with administrators and content editors as target users.

This separation of concerns will make easy for you to attend the very different needs ot the two group of users with accuracy. (And I'm not sure but it will probably have an effect in performance of the system?).

With this separation you will have too more consistency in documentation, screencasts etc.. And site administrators and content editors working on several sites will have a single admin UI, not a different UI on each site, or a different UI each time they change the skin on the frontend.

If you think that these suggestions make sense, let me know, and I will be glad to help, investing some time in made some research in this area. So you dont need to make all tedious work.

Best Regards,

Matias Molleja

Hi Joe,   I really like mojoPortal.  I've just started  working with MojoPortal for a couple weeks.

I have a few small usability admin suggestions that I think  would make the interface a little more useable for new users.

1. On the main edit page, I found  the "Setting" Link  ambiguious (Content or Page?)
   You have Content Instance Name followed by setting if you change the
  link name  from "Setting" to "Content Setting" there would be less  ambiquity whether
   the setting is Content or Page setting.  The tooltip is good but not visible unless your cursor over .

2. On Page Setting, the Save button is not visible without  scrollling to the save button. 

   If the settings page would put the check boxes across and down the page    instead of one checkbox per line,
   the Save button would be appear on same screen as all the input items without needing to scroll to the save button.

3. On the Page Setting, the Text on the Frame/border " Settings For Page xxxxxx xxxx"
   Add Highlighting (bold , color , size etc..) to menu name text: Settings For Menu Name
   would make it even more obvious on what page your working on .

Thanks for a great CMS.

Matt