We are very impressed with Zammad indeed. We want to start using it in earnest, but have a little bit of a problem in that it isn’t especially responsive. We will work around for now, but wondered how we could change this.
From searching, I know this has caused some sharp discussion on this board before, but want to approach this constructively by proposing to begin doing this work. Down the line the intention will be to actually put in pull requests and tackle it head on.
So I am wondering, if you were starting to make Zammad responsive, where would you kick off? What are the heavy difficulties in proceeding? How would you go from nothing started to done in terms of a rough plan?
Again, approaching this constructively. We have a team willing to do the work, but need to understand where to begin. If there is some absolutely core reason why this cannot or should not be done, then that is fine also!
Hey @alex_ck - welcome to the community! That’s great to hear We’re planning to build a WebApp v2 with quite a few changes but haven’t had the resources to start yet. We don’t plan to put too much effort into the current WebApp v1 so we actually can’t offer any concrete help to tackle this problem for now. Anyhow, we’re happy to help in any way. If you have more concrete questions on how you’d approach it I’m happy to discuss them with you. We’d totally merge your pull requests. We’re always happy to receive contributions. Looking forward to hear from you!
Thanks very much for your response, good to hear. Will ask some concrete questions!
Do you have an idea of the tech stack you will be drawing upon for WebApp v2? What we can do is follow this quite closely, in the hope that adaptations can be merged back in. For your reference, our preferred stack would be TypeScript and React where needed, but we will take your lead.
We are particularly interested in how you’d approach styling. We can see ways that the current design can be iterated in relatively minor ways to achieve some utility on phones (for example, modifying the use of Flexbox to be more mobile first, adding the HTML tag to allow the viewport to respond). Are you minded to adopt a CSS framework?
Hey @bur - thanks for your feedback. We hear you We’re not working a completely new design. Zammad 1.0 was released in Oktober of 2016 and the UI hasn’t changed since then. In the meantime we received so much valuable feedback from thousands of users in workshops, here in the community and in the early days over at GitHub. Some approaches and views work great. Some cause trouble. We’re happy and some kind of proud that version 1.0 is still such a solid and liked interface. Having an outstanding UI that helps you folks out there in your daily life helping people is one of our cornerstones and main goals. However, there is room for improvement in details and in general. We will address those.
@alex_ck - Great questions! I can’t go much into details on how things will change because it’s not set in stone yet. We’re in the final phase of evaluating the required changes and the impact of this truly huge undertaking. Unfortunately there are some copy cats out there. We at Zammad believe that information and ideas should be open, accessible, transparent and shared. However, we’re still a small team that loves what we’re doing and spending time on details because that’s the recipe for a great product. That gives our “competitors” an advantage because of their manpower and resources at hand. While we’re catching up we are not in the position to work as we’re planing to do - yet.
Please give us a bit of time and I’ll get back to you (I just created a ticket for that). As soon as things get concrete and I’m able to share with you founded information I will. We’d love to work close to you or maybe together. I’ll get back to you on this as well.
To answer your question: It’s not set into stone yet but will be in short time and I’ll let you know. Once we decided it will take quite a while to apply the changes. We’re talking months here. Like Zammad 4.0 months.
I think the Zammad WebApp v1 would still profit from your changes and contributions. However, It’s unlikely that they will work with the WebApp v2. It also means that we won’t introduce any tech stack changes into v1.
I hope this is of any value for you. If not let me know and I’ll try again
Thanks very much for taking the time to consider this. I will take a note to check back soon.
If you like, after this, we can set up a call to chat in more detail. We are quite serious about assisting and have some resources we can bring to this effort. We’ve got a pretty unique usecase - using this for grassroots trade unions - but feel it would be valuable to contribute upstream.
We’re planning to build a WebApp v2 with quite a few changes but haven’t had the resources to start yet. We don’t plan to put too much effort into the current WebApp v1 so we actually can’t offer any concrete help to tackle this problem for now. Anyhow, we’re happy to help in any way. If you have more concrete questions on how you’d approach it I’m happy to discuss them with you. We’d totally merge your pull requests. We’re always happy to receive contributions. Looking forward to hear from you!
We’re not working a completely new design. Zammad 1.0 was released in Oktober of 2016 and the UI hasn’t changed since then. In the meantime we received so much valuable feedback from thousands of users in workshops, here in the community and in the early days over at GitHub. Some approaches and views work great. Some cause trouble. We’re happy and some kind of proud that version 1.0 is still such a solid and liked interface. Having an outstanding UI that helps you folks out there in your daily life helping people is one of our cornerstones and main goals. However, there is room for improvement in details and in general. We will address those.