Virtualmin Bootstrap Theme update with screenshots

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#1 Mon, 10/20/2014 - 17:28
Joe
Joe's picture

Virtualmin Bootstrap Theme update with screenshots

Hey all,

With the release of two really nice new themes by third party developers (see here: https://www.virtualmin.com/node/34315 and here: https://www.virtualmin.com/node/34419 ), I've re-focused on what makes the Bootstrap theme I've been working on unique...responsiveness across multiple screen sizes. My plans also include making Webmin more theme-able...less reliance on Perl code, and more ability to customize based on CSS stylesheets.

Those other two themes are really good, and we recommend folks try them out (and report bugs to their developers), and with the developers permission (and a bit of tweaking) we'll probably begin shipping them with a default install of Virtualmin, as optional theme choices. But, work will continue to progress on the Virtualmin Bootstrap theme, with plans to merge upstream the new CSS-based layouts, and single page application style, to the standard Webmin UI API in Webmin 2.0. It's a longer term vision that will hopefully make the Webmin theme ecosystem much more friendly to designers.

In the meantime, I've converted to new responsive markup in a number of locations. For example, the System Information screen on a medium-to-large screen:

http://i.imgur.com/TY8vBu7l.png

And, on a small screen, the columns get stacked into a single column:

http://i.imgur.com/HVPv3dEl.png

Looks like a simple thing, and it actually was pretty simple to implement once some other stuff in the markup and backend code got simplified, but it's really a useful step toward a theme that looks good and functions well across all types of device.

I'll be working on the responsive menu functionality next, and also converting to a new menu layout. With a few more bugfixes, the Virtualmin Bootstrap theme will see a beta release to the repos. In the meantime, folks who want to help with development can grab it from: https://github.com/virtualmin/virtualmin-bootstrap-theme

There are enough outstanding bugs that I really don't recommend using it on production servers. If you want a nice, and almost fully functional, Bootstrap based Virtualmin theme, Authentic is probably the best choice right now (it's got a few minor bugs, too, but nothing that prevents users from doing everything one can do in Virtualmin and Webmin; my theme still has major functional issues).

Cheers,

Joe