Developer forum

Hi Morten - It's a great suggestion changing the UI. We have been talking a lot about it and we have, I believe, some nice suggestions and ideas. It would be a rather large project and we haven't settled for a release for this to be in, but Dynamicweb 9 may be the right time.

Thanks for your input,

Asger - Product Manager 

Hi Morten and Asger,

I'm not a big fan of remaking the entire backend, i actually think that a lot of our customers like, and some might even love the UI.

But that doesn't mean that there isn't room for improvements. I have a few suggestions i'd like to see in the near future, before a total overhaul of the backend.

For instance these things bug my when using the administration.

- It seems a lot of though have gone in to making eCom a good experience, fx. we have the ability to rightclick columns headers to add new columns. Why can't i do that when working with News V2? And other modules?

- When saving products, i end up in the productlist i came from. When saving a global paragraph, i'd like to get back to the page where i clicked my paragraph.

Generally it would be nice to see the same implementations of features across the entire CMS - Consistency i key.

But of cause, if you were building the CMS from scratch today, all the suggestions are awesome, I just think that DW should spend their time on other things, than a total backend overhaul :-) (At least for now)

// Martin

Hi Martin - I see your point, and that's why it's not planned yet, but we need to keep it in our minds that user behavior changes. We do believe we have a good UI but it can be optimised technical wise like Morten suggests and we see some other changes that would improve the daily routines for our web-administrators.

And for your suggestions - right click columns are added to user management in 8.2 but will not be added to News V2 as the module will be re-implemented in 8.3 with items. If you have any other places where you believe it's missing, let me know. Regarding saving global paragraphs I believe we have discussed it in the Product Management team, but I will raise the issue again and let you know. 

Thanks for your suggestion - it's great with partner input!

//Asger 

Martin, I totally agree that more consistency is needed. As it is now, I guess that many features cannot be easily shared across the different parts of the system, but needs to be implemented or customized in each case (pages, products, news etc.).

The existing UI is not that bad and I know that many customers are very satified about it. Compared to the interfaces of most desktop applications and CMSs from last millennium, sure Dynamicwebs UI is great, but I also think that customers will expect a lot more from a CMS in the future and Dynamicweb needs to keep up with the competition. That being said, Dynamicweb is certainly not among the worst CMSs regarding the UI - far from it.

I believe that rebuilding the UI from scratch (maybe incremental) would be very beneficial in the long run. New features could be more easily introduced across modules (less development time/cost) and with less risk of introducing new bugs. A more extensible UI will make it possible for solution partners to add small custom features that can help editors in their daily work, create seamless integration with external systems etc.

Anyway, the current roadmap for Dynamicweb is filled with a lot of great things, so I don't expect a completely new UI in the near future, but it's on the wishlist for DW9 ;-)