The Joomla!^® User Experience Portal

The new admin template looks very good and is a great job for bringing J! up-to-date.

As seen on many of the posts of the forum, one can not avoid to compare Joomla with Wordpress, mainly because of the quota chunks WP has been biting from J! since it's last evolutions (custom post types, rudemntary ACL,...). And the J! team has been developing even more complex and flexible features to counter that.

However, I believe that the main advantage of wordpress over Joomla is content creation friendlyness. A developer/webdesigner has the basis to and can adapt to any CMS, thus being able to bypass usability issues. However, the end users (the customer, the one that pays) find J! standard editor cumbersome and light years behing WP. And it doesn't help telling them that it's the same (tinyMCE), because they will immediately ask "then, why is one so bad compared to the other". And we, the site webmasters, give them an alternative like K2 or ZOO or Seblod, each one with it's advantages and disadvantages, or move them to WordPress.

My point here, meaning no disrespect to the J! developer community and understanding that it's voluntary pro-bono work, is that if Joomla! it is a Content Manager, than it should excel in creating and managing content. That should be the primary focus rather than having the ability to "double nest menus" or "granular infinite ACL". Of course, all these features are very important and necessary everytime one has to make a more complex website, but the new version should be excelent on the foundation of what it's supposed to do, not on the advanced features.

Although the new editor tab based display is a great improvement over previous versions, a number of things are (in my opinion) very improvable:

- The editor skin: maybe a new skin, that doesn't resemble the 1990's or go to JCE as default (with a modern skin)

- the image/media uploader/manager: it's more or less the same from J!1.5, a 5 year old solution. Why not a manager like gmail's attachment uploader or ate least JCE file/image manager

- the images area of the article: why not move it up to the tabs (one tab for images, like in K2)

- article options tab: there is a big list of options, basically ported from the 2.5 interface. Why not group the logically in a couple of collumns, for not forcing a scroll dow. Better yet, create an "advanced" or "administrator" options tab where these and some other options like acl can be grouped.

- tabs ordereing: overall, could be ordered in a logical editor point of view: article, images and media, custom fields, metadata, advanced/admin. "Publishing" tab could be on the right of the editor, like today

- tags (rudimentary taxonomy): we don't even have to look to wordpress, just look to K2's implementation. Tags become an valuable SEO feature and it would be nice to have them natively. there are a few components already to manage them, maybe integrating one in the core.

I am aware that this is just a alpha and many things will change,
And understand this is a big effort from the developer community, investing their free time in this great piece of software. But I also believe that with minor tweaks, there can be huge gains in the J! editor usability, making it much more user friendly to end-users.

Just my five cents....

apessoa wrote:


I agree wholeheartedly. The points on the WYSIWYG editor and media manager interface being outdated is spot on.

I am also looking forward to these changes. But believe Joomla development is more on the technical side (?) and interface is often an afterthought. The JUX group is a great start. I wish to see clean modern 3.0 interfaces to rival Wordpress.

I am not talking about blatantly copying ideas. I believe Joomla can come up with something better. But at this point we are so far behind in terms of user friendly interface compared to other features of Joomla 3.0. No offence but it is like having a top end Intel Core i7 PC running Win 3.1 in emulator mode.

There is nothing wrong in getting inspiration from great works. As Picasso said, "Good Artists Borrow, Great Artists Steal"

I am thinking of something like Redactor
redactorjs.com/

It has a slick image insert/upload feature similar to Wordpress's. Try the demo.

What do you think?

Yep, Redactor seems to be the thing.
The J! team only has to buy a developer license ($99) and then integrate it in the core.
Hey, even I'll buy it and offer it to the J! team

The file/link manager will have to be worked on to have some features like JCE advlink, but overall seems like the thing

By the way, there is a discussion about this here https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/...-dev-cms/eQJLLMECYVU

It's lengthy and has some interesting ideas and suggestions, but one of the troublesome things said is that J!3 features are closed right now so, apparently, no new editor (at least not like the one on the JUX template demo previous to J!3 alpha).

I like the Redactorjs. This editor could be a good alternative to TinyMCE.
Vi are using JCE in almost all projects and with all the plugins is this state of the art I think.
I'm missing CSS possibilities in Redactor. But this could be realized easily.

Would like to see something like link-building in JCE to Joomla content, menus or contacts and even more.

Time will show

I agree with you.
What bothers me is that, as far as I understood, J!3 features are closed and TinyMCE will remain the base editor.
I don't understang why J! team simply doesn't include in the core, at least, JCE or K2. If there is a real concern about the UX, then why not just include the current best practices rather then trying to reinvent the weel (and then not being able to mimic the good things already there). I'm really getting frustrated with J!
I love the presentation capabilities and the flexibilitym, but simply have a hard time everytime I have to build a site and get customers to add content.

Now that I think about it, TinyMCE is at the core of Wordpress article editing and it is such a pleasure to work with. Why isn't this the case with Joomla's TinyMCE?

For one, the styling is better.
Secondly, WP's image editing/uploader is tightly integrated with the editor.

It creates a congruent experience for the user.

Maybe we don't need to change TinyMCE at all. Maybe it is not the problem at all.

Maybe we just need an image uploader along the line of these : codecanyon.net/browse/tags/default/uploader