Joomla 4 and the missing connection.

[poproar]

I tried out joomla 4 briefly last night and had a fleeting moment that I could get excited about the future. The excitement came from the realization that work is being done but my excitement was fizzled by the notion the next version might miss the mark. I do not want to stir any negativity because it is a turn off but I would like to be a part of the discussion.
As for working with the codebase I think Joomla is doing great things that you cannot see but it is the things I did see that pushed me to find a place to speak up. So here I am. I know joomla4 is a work in progress so please take what I am saying as observation. The admin side needs to be something administrators want to use on mobile. A fantastic UX from the mobile perspective for admins can motivate architects to use Joomla. This is probably not news to the team but what I am seeing is a struggle to keep Joomla admin familiar to old users and attractive to WP users. Somehow this approach feels boxed and is missing a lot of opportunity. In providing great support for clients, I have tried to make quick changes through the admin on a mobile device while out in the field only to be frustrated and keep the process archaic with any version of joomla. Being able to make admin side changes with ease while away from a desk is very empowering. If it remains cumbersome I believe it will miss the next wave. As of this moment I do not have a solution but I think there are others out there who might be having these observations.

[websitedons]

What specifically is lacking when in mobile view? I am able to make changes using a phone with the ISIS admin template. It adapts properly.

Maybe this concept by JoomShaper, planned for J4, may be of interest.

joomla-4-admin-concept-banner_full.jpg

[poproar]

I think I saw that on the twitter https://www.joomshaper.com/blog/joomla- ... joomshaper and yes it is very nice. ISIS admin template does adapt but action buttons are small, content tables are juggled, and I remember a few other pain points. I have not tried this process for about a year so I will do that this week. By no means am I demanding that administration needs to be done via mobile but I am thinking about how I interact via mobile versus desktop (dashboard style). Sure RWD via bootstrap framework (or any other) helps adapt to screen size but how do we help joomla stand above instead of being just good enough? I am also taking into consideration Brian Teeman's https://brian.teeman.net/joomla/content ... -in-joomla article.

[deleted user]

JoomShaper's concept is just that, a concept. It has not been proposed to anyone involved with the Joomla! 4 development and should not be considered anything more than an idea a company shared (not commenting on the concept's quality or ideas in general, just stating that it's not something "official").

As for the UI's current state. The team that built the new templates has largely just converted the existing structures from Bootstrap 2 to Bootstrap 4 and thus far there really hasn't been any drastic changes. So right now (especially as there has yet to be an alpha release), it's expected that there are quite a few quirks and areas for improvement. As always though, feel free to submit bug reports and feature requests relating to 4.0 at https://github.com/joomla/joomla-cms (and please search before submitting to not create a duplicate item; we've also tried to organize a lot of the 4.0 specific items through the projects area on GitHub so that may help).

[poproar]

Thanks Michael,
The project pages are great! Thank you for the pointer. Very helpful.

[poproar]

edit_article40dev.png

Despite this is not fully baked, I still believe that an admin might be a superhero if making edits in the field was eased out of the box. Currently it feels cramped.

[deleted user]

I'd have to double check, but I don't believe they've put much focus on non-desktop displays as of yet. You are right though that right now it's not in the best of condition. Although to counter that, aside from the new template's tabs stuff and how the title/alias fields are rendered, at least TinyMCE's presentation doesn't differ much from what's in core now. So at least we aren't looking at a major regression at the moment.

Logging items on GitHub would definitely be beneficial to ensure they don't get lost in the mix.