Hi Aron,

Design: Can't really hammer on the design, I think. 2.4 was awful but worked fine, 3.0 is a great step in the right direction. The fact that people are bitching mostly about colours must mean that the rest of it is pretty good. I think a few changes will come along, like being able to configure if you want a pop-up window or not.

Slowness: 3.0 feels faster in our setup. The drop-downs are instant. I'm not familiar with the execution, but I believe the drop-downs are javascript and their speed thus depend on the client machine. Have you tried on different machines and see if the results are different?

If it's not a case of a slow client, I think you need to look into your setup. A first step is to install the SupportAssessment package and see if it recommends you to make changes. Most speed is gained from mod_perl and DBI.

Oh, and regarding that Custom theme: You could have just copied the Standard theme to a folder with the name of your Custom theme. Then you wouldn't have needed to change any configuration.

Lars

From: otrs-bounces@otrs.org [mailto:otrs-bounces@otrs.org] On Behalf Of Aron Rotteveel
Sent: Tuesday, December 21, 2010 1:46 PM
To: otrs
Subject: [otrs] OTRS 3.0.4 findings

Hi,

After some fiddling around, I managed to get my 2.4.9 install upgraded to 3.0.4. I found a lot of problems regarding the use of a custom theme; I had to manually edit the database user preferences and ZZZAuto.pm in order to reset everything to 'Standard'.

Anyway, I thought it would be good to post some of my findings so far:

• First of all: the customer interface is WAY more clean than the admin interface. Personally, I really don't like the black+orange layout of the admin interface and think the menu takes too much space. The customer interface on the other hand is brilliant: it's really clean and compact. I would *love* to see this implemented in the admin interface as well.
• Slowness: I haven't been able to benchmark anything, but it feels like upgrading to 3.x made my setup a lot slower
• Customer interface slow ticket hovers: in the latest Chrome build (havent tested in other browsers), the mouseover on the tickets in the customer interface is terribly slow. Also, the orange really is 'too much'. A simple grey hover would fit better, imo. The same counts for the admin interface, apart from slowness.
• Read / unread tickets: the star is really confusing. Stars are generally accepted as a 'mark as favorite' design pattern, but in this case, it acts as a read/unread indicator. It would probably be better another icon that better fits this design pattern.
• Editor: I don't know if anyone would disagree, but I really think a simpler editor would be better. FCKEditor is still fine, but there is really no need to have the ability to use Comic Sans or change font widths. This could probably be made available through configuration options, so that the default is cleaner and simpler. As a default, I'd suggest: Bold, Italic, Underline, Ordered list, unordered list, link and image. 
• Menu mouseover: I'd really like to see the menu's collapse on mouseover instead of click. Clicking the 'ticket' menu should lead to the first submenu item.
• More slowness: dropdown menu's seem terribly slow. I have not looked into it, but it almost feels that the content is being pulled on click. I repeat: it is *terribly* slow. A click is delayed by aprox 0.3seconds, which is really adds up and makes it less of a good experience.
• Scrollbar: it is probably better to show the scrollbar by default through CSS; clicking through the interface makes the layout move horizontally due to partially loaded content in some cases (in my case, in the ticket detail screen). It feels a bit 'clunky'.

Overall, I'm happy with the upgrade. The first point of improvement for me would be a drastic speed improvement, both server and client side. Simple things like collapsing menu's and mousehovers should feel *far* more responsive than they do now. 

Thanks for your efforts and work.

--
Best regards / Met vriendelijke groet,

Aron Rotteveel