After making multiple UI changes to Manage Mailboxes, it became more and more clear to me that esprit needs a design overhaul. The existing control panel cannot architecturally and aesthetically support the level of complexity necessary to facilitate modal edit boxes and AJAX callbacks, two critical components of the new interface. Having said that, I have forked the main trunk in the esprit repository and started on the important design changes.
I am sure many of you have noticed the tiny design changes, which was my first intention: to gradually, piece-by-piece, promote esprit 0.99 to 1.0 while working on other features. Unfortunately it appears to be more evident with each passing keystroke that we are at the crossroads of design. Either I can continue with nasty patchwork or rebuild the infrastructure to allow greater flexibility and control over the page presentation in esprit. The downside to a redesign is that esprit won’t be changing for a minimum of 2 weeks, but the upside to all of this chaos is that we will have something easier to support, easier to manage, and most importantly, easier to add value.
So that’s that; back to work.
– Matt
2:58 PM EDT Update: Here is the revised login portal:
