I’m hoping The Hub v3 will go through some massive UI changes. The UI has always been too rigid.
This discussion has come up before, that there is information about a site that should be available in a network view, but it’s only available on opening every site one by one and going to the specific feature definitions page. For example, if I want to know if feature F is set for Plugin P, I need to open site1, go to the settings for Plugin P, then click in the right margin to see that setting for every site. That’s really primitive, 1980’s 80×24 green screen character terminal thinking.
This suggestion is to make the main Hub site listing parameter-driven, so that we can define what we want to see rather than being limited to what some people think is a great one-size-fits-all solution.
I can stretch the Sites page across two monitors and with Hub2 will never get more data than a nearsighted admin can see with big text for a limited number of features.
Now picture reports that allow you to add your own columns and then save the setting as a profile which can be used by others. When the Sites listing is displayed, go through the list and add a column for each Boolean true that is found for available features. This is an application, it’s not a text article. Make use of the screen space – or stop trying to decide what’s best for everyone else and let users decide what fields they want. Anyone who wants a lot of fields in a small monitor space should still be able to horizontal-scroll to see everything they’ve selected. We vertical scroll to see all of our sites – why not horizontal scroll? It works for Excel. Or we should be able to select different profiles to show the data that will fit in the current monitor.
The goal is that when I need to know a single setting for all sites, I want to look down the grid of sites and see that one setting. I want to see black, green, yellow, or red icons – not just to know if a plugin is enabled (which is well done as it is now), but to see details.
Yes, we can mouseover each icon and see some detail, but that provides limited data that has been hard-coded by DEV developers. It could take years-to-never to have other data added – and we don’t actually want All data added for All admins because all of that data extraction is costly/non-performant. But it is practical for us to pre-define the fields that we want so that when the Sites page is opened we can see that data after an expected pause for a data refresh.
The Hub v1 was a short-lived Beta. The Hub v2 has been here a long time and has not matured much. v3 really should be much more versatile.
OR … I have requested a Hub API many times. If DEV isn’t going to add fields into the Hub UI, make those fields available via an API so that we can create our own screens. Don’t bind UI and data, visual detail with functionality. Create the API and then use it from the Hub for your own UI … but let us then use it to create our own UI … because one-size-fits-all is never a good solution when there are a Lot of clients who use a Lot of features on a Lot of sites.
Thanks.