GenUIne: The New Magnolia GUI

On this page we will document and collect all information about the new Magnolia Admin Central GUI (codenamed GenUIne).

Getting Started with GenUIne Below you find some general information about the GenUIne project. However, you might want to go directly into one of the two trails: GenUIne Design Trail - all about GenUIne usability and design GenUIne Technical Trail - all about GenUIne's underlying technical infrastructure and client implementation

About the project

Scope

The Genuine project covers the following intentions (prioritized):

1. Technology (back-end): introduce a standardized, customizable and extensible technology for creating the next generation of the Admin Central UI
2. Usability: improve Magnolia back-end's usability and user-experience
3. Technology (front-end): we also try to introduce a technology that better supports developers building fully AJAX-enabled websites

Goals & Intentions

The primary goal of this project is to ease development and maintenance of the Magnolia back-end to make it more robust, more customizable and less error prone when changes are applied.
In short the targets are:

• ease-of-development
• extensibility
• customization
• usability
  • effectiveness & efficiency
  • error robustness
  • satisfaction ("joy-of-use")

For a more detailed list, see the analysis page.

Roadmap

The project is separated into two distinct trails that we will work on in parallel. The first trail is the one about interface and interaction design (in the following referred to as "interface trail"), the other one is about the utilized technologies (referred to as "technology trail").

The interface trail will be developed according to the so called Usability Engineering Process Model, which basically separates the development of user interfaces related projects into different project phases (like analysis, concept/design, evaluation, implementation etc.). See the links below for the documentation of each of those phases.

From the technological point of view the project operates in a very critical area as there are many potential technologies out there which evolve and change very fast. Thus, we at first have to carefully consider different approaches that are accepted to be "future-proofed" and meet our requirements. Regarding this, the different approaches that we will keep track of are:

• JSF based user interface, an all-in-one approach
• Webservice based approach which allows adopting various, completely decoupled front-end technologies, e.g. JavaScript based

Both of them possibly require integration technologies that we will take a look on like XForms, JSON, etc. Informations for each technology evaluated are collected on the pages linked below.