[katello-devel] Foreman skin design spike

Thu Jul 26 13:22:59 UTC 2012

On 07/26/2012 03:46 AM, Ivan Nečas wrote:
> On 07/25/2012 04:52 PM, Hugh O. Brock wrote:
>> On Wed, Jul 25, 2012 at 10:29:22AM -0400, Malini Rao wrote:
>>>
>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>> From: "Jason Rist" <jrist at redhat.com>
>>> To: katello-devel at redhat.com
>>> Sent: Wednesday, July 25, 2012 9:40:45 AM
>>> Subject: Re: [katello-devel] Foreman skin design spike
>>>
>>> On 07/24/2012 08:29 AM, Tomas Strachota wrote:
>>>> Team,
>>>> I've finished a design spike to make Foreman look like Katello. So far
>>>> it seems that we can make most of the skinning without bigger problems
>>>> just by creating new styles for the bootstrap css & js library.
>>>>
>>>> You can checkout summary of the investigation and some screenshots on
>>>> our wiki
>>>> https://fedorahosted.org/katello/wiki/ForemanSkinDesign
>>> Is there an instance that we could see these changes in? The 
>>> screenshots are useful and the initial changes are looking good but 
>>> I would like to see a bit more and provide you some feedback from 
>>> the UX consistency perspective. For instance, in the Environments 
>>> list screen, if we cannot do a 2-pane, then the location of the 'New 
>>> Environment' button/ link seems a little odd.
>>>> Please note that not everything has been styled. Eg. most of the 
>>>> buttons
>>>> have still it's original look. I didn't want to loose much time 
>>>> with it
>>>> since there's a fair chance that we will just throw it away.
>>> So what is the plan? Are we going to be hopping on to Foreman that 
>>> kinda looks like Katello at certain points in the workflow and then 
>>> jump back into Katello? Is this a short term strategy before we have 
>>> a more seamless integration? Either way, I think we should have some 
>>> UX discussions around how these switches happen so that the overall 
>>> UX is not impacted severely. The fact that Foreman is made to look 
>>> more like Katello increases the expectation that the overall 
>>> navigation and UI paradigms will be the same. This is why, I would 
>>> like to see a demo if possible on a workflow that involves this 
>>> switch so we can evaluate the usability impact.
>> I love the idea of having a Foreman UI skin that makes it look like
>> Cloudforms, that is good stuff.
>>
>> Having said that, I'm fairly certain that we're going to want to be
>> able to build workflows in Katello that touch Foreman objects and we
>> probably want not to force the user to a *third* different webapp, no
>> matter how similar we make it look. This means there is going to have
>> to be some work done in Katello UI to represent Foreman objects, one
>> way or another...
> Certainly not force to use it, but enable to use it, and give a 
> feeling that it's a part of the whole solution. I agree that the basic 
> workflow should be supported in Katello without needing to log into 
> the Foreman. OTOH, I believe that there are some advanced features in 
> Foreman (like reporting, custom templates, maybe VNC console etc.) 
> that probably won't be available from Katello UI, but still it would 
> be nice to make it available for the users (without fear that they 
> might do something in Foreman that would break the integration). From 
> Foreman community point of view, I think it would be beneficial as 
> well to let them use Katello and Foreman together, without forcing 
> them to leave the Foreman UI completely.
>
> So if it would be possible for basic use-cases use only Katello and 
> for advanced ones let users safely go into Foreman UI, it would be great.
>
> -- Ivan

While this is a nice goal to have I think someone higher up needs to 
decide whether this is actually something that is a requirement or not 
and we need to spec out what all it would take. This is not a simple 
undertaking. As a minimum we'd need to add orchestration to foreman for 
all shared entities (in addition to doing the same for katello), modify 
katello to allow foreman to orchestrate to it, a unified permissions 
model, and the same permission enforcement in katello and foreman. These 
are not quick things to do :)

It also increases the QA requirements greatly. As there would now be 4 
ways of creating and modifying something like an environment (Katello 
UI/API & Foreman UI/API). We would definitely want to get QA's input 
into the matter.

I like the idea of users being able to do more advanced things in 
foreman, there's just a LOT of get there.

-Justin

>>
>> --H
>>
>>>> Questions and ideas are welcome.
>>>>
>>>> Tomas
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> katello-devel mailing list
>>>> katello-devel at redhat.com
>>>> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/katello-devel
>>> Looks very nice. I think some Foreman pages might benefit from Tupane.
>>>
>>> So what's the next step? Is it worth doing additional work for upstream
>>> Foreman to look like another Red Hat CloudForms upstream related 
>>> product?
>>>
>>> -J
>>>
>>> -- 
>>> Jason E. Rist
>>> Senior Software Engineer
>>> Systems Management and Cloud Enablement
>>> Red Hat, Inc.
>>> +1.919.754.4048
>>> Freenode: jrist
>>>
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