UX RFC: Move templates to the top menu or Provision menu

Development RFCs
1

I would like to propose moving Templates from Hosts menu to be a top-level menu. Reasons:

  1. Hosts menu is getting very populated already, on 768/800px screens it already have scroll bar if you install Katello and other standard plugins which are shipped with Satellite 6.

  2. Hosts and templates are both essential features of Foreman, they should not share one menu.

  3. We figured out that it’s not just me visiting Configure menu with mouse every time I want to go to Templates. I always go there, cannot explain why and I remember this when we had top menu as well.

Subject of the move:

  • Partitioin tables
  • Provisioning templates
  • Job templates

We can rename them dropping unnecessary “templates” word if they have own menu:

  • Partitions
  • Provisioning
  • Remote execution jobs

I believe this could be part of a UX study, because as I write I just saw @dLobatog trying to find Subnets in Configure main menu (Subnets/Domains are in Infrastructure menu actually). Maybe there’s more. Edit: CCing @Roxanne_Hoover

3 Likes
2

I think this is something worth looking at. Though I don’t have an educated opinion on the correct order or hierarchy of the current menu (as I have not done the research), it has been brought to my attention on more than one occasion that the menus could use work.

3

We slightly discussed this in Brno today. Some opinions:

  • Hosts main menu could contain only host-relevant entries (currently 3-5 depending on plugins) or hosts + compliance
  • Hostgroups could be moved from Configure to Hosts
  • We will be likely getting rid of Containers, might make sense to move them out of the main menu.
  • Templates could deserve own top menu or we could also create top menu named Provisioning with templates, OS, installation media, architectures and hardware models.

I don’t know what is the best UX process, but I would like to suggest something radical - let’s agree on something and since we just merged 1.18 let’s simply merge the change and see how it works for us during development and testing. We will have three full months to fine tune it.

1 Like
4

I will likely be adding Containers back to menu somewhere through katello.
It will show container image content (moving the tags menu entry there) as
well as running containers on compute resources. I don’t have a preference
at the moment if it is top level or lower, though I don’t see where it
would fit at lower level.

I’m +1 on making templates more prominent and accessible.

1 Like
5

I’ll just say that we branched 1.18 early in April, which means we have about another month until we branch 1.19!

6

Thanks for correction.

@Roxanne_Hoover we briefly talked with Tereza and she had an idea to do “card game” survey if I get that correctly. I’d prefer to do an online analysis but if we find time we could do something with real cards in Brno this week.