I respect and appreciate the effort put in by the SuiteCRM team. Opensource software development is a thankless job most of the time.
I am one of the many people who has had never ending UI related issues starting from v7.x Even with the release of v7.10, which claims to be a “clean UI”, there are several bugs. After browsing through the forum topics, I have realized that the UI issues are not isolated to any one particular module. What SuiteCRM needs is a strong UI testing team. There are several people who have given feedback and screenshots about their UI woes. Given that the core modules are stable to a large extent, SuiteCRM, in my opinion, should now focus on removing the UI bugs. The next dot release should probably be dedicated to fixing the UI alone. I hope it happens.
You are somewhat right, but let me tell you a bit more about the processes.
Before any release all the upgraders are tested manually (so - from 7.7 to 7.10, from 7.8. to 7.10, from 7.8 to 7.9, etc.). Dozens of installs and upgrades, for every release, which sometimes happen once a week, or every two weeks.
We have zero cases of the broken CSS after upgrade in the lab, although there are many cases here in the forums. We still don’t know what’s causing it. We often discover it’s badly configured systems. Basically, if you have configured your Linux to not let SuiteCRM write files to disk, it doesn’t work, and there’s nothing it can do about it.
Many of the problems are related to Email, and SalesAgility has recognized that the new Email module is a pain point, lessons were learned, but it’s harder than it seems. It’s slowly going in the right direction. I am personally invested in taking this to a successful point, see this.
We have started using automated testing, coverage is about 20%, it now needs to grow. This is one great area for the community to help.
Then, once things work, without bugs, without missing CSS, there are, of course UI issues to improve: make it look better, work on the UX (user experience).
Hello, Thanks for the reply. Although it has taken me some time to reply, here are my suggestions.
Look and Feel of UI is a personal choice. Lets keep that aside.
With whatever primary UI SuiteCRM has decided, focus on ensuring that it works. For e.g., I have several areas where the Day and Night themes render differently.
I don’t know if the existing code is fully based on themes. If not, make it fully theme compliant. This will also help graphic designers make their own themes.
Get more users to test during beta. External Beta users give a good sampling of what you might see in the real world.
Something that works perfectly internally, may not work in the real world. Internal systems are tuned to perfection, whereas others are not.
When users report a problem ask them to provide the complete data. “This does not work” is not an acceptable form of reporting a problem.
I am willing to contribute and test the UI on 2 platforms - Linux and Mac and offer my inputs.
Thanks for your suggestions, i read them with attention.
There were 3 betas plus a release candidate when building up to this release. If you have suggestions as to how we can get more people to test, I’d love to hear them, but the product is quite big and nobody really tests all of it…
There are some technical subtleties surrounding the SuiteCRM UI that don’t make it easy to get themes for. There is too much logic tied behind to the layouts, the layer separation is not optimal. The current solution is a half-step towards what we aim to do in v8.0 where we hope to improve and modernize the architecture.