virtualmin icons

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#1 Wed, 07/20/2005 - 13:30
davedrysdale

virtualmin icons

What webmin theme are you using or is that the one that ships with virtualmin. I like the icons a lot.

Wed, 07/20/2005 - 15:50
MartinMewes

Hi,

please visit

http://www.swelltech.com/projects/webmin/swell-theme.html

as I think this is what you want.

Wed, 07/20/2005 - 18:15
Joe
Joe's picture

Actually, we have a new Virtualmin-Nuvola theme, based on the Nuvola KDE and Gnome themes by David Vignoni...We've had him design 50 or so new icons in addition to the stock bundle (he'll be doing more for Virtualmin, Webmin and Usermin in the future, if we can compete with University for his time). It will be distributed with the Virtualmin Professional bundle.

We're not sure what the license on the theme will be yet, though it will likely be available for download soon.

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Wed, 07/20/2005 - 18:21
Joe
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Oh, and the theme Martin pointed out was designed by me (all 200+ icons), but even I have to admit that the work pales in comparison to David Vignoni's fantastic icons.

The latest version of that theme is available here:

http://www.swelltech.com/projects/webmin/swell-theme-v2.html

It's reasonably cute, reasonably clean, and works on all browsers, even text-mode browsers like lynx. I think it is better than the Webmin default MSC theme, but I might be moderately biased towards my own work.

But my new favorite theme is definitely the Virtualmin-Nuvola theme in its many versions (there are several variants with different color schemes). The File Manager is too pretty to be believed. But I'm just ticking people off talking about it before it is publically available, so I'll shutup about it.

We're going as fast as we can to get stuff available for purchase and download!

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Thu, 07/21/2005 - 17:41
davedrysdale

Well if the theme is open source I will gladly use it. I will also be willing to pay for it as I like pretty icons.

Thu, 07/28/2005 - 01:57
MartinMewes

me too :-)

Tue, 11/15/2005 - 00:49
MartinNicholls

Just to jump in with a quick in-the-mean-time suggestion - most of those [[awesome]] icons are avalable from David's website at http://www.icon-king.com/ - I don't think there's anything stopping anybody hacking a good theme like StressFree (which has very nice icons of it's own anyway) and adding those icons in - the end result should work well if there's any taste / tallent out there - which should be the case :)

Tue, 11/15/2005 - 01:36
Joe
Joe's picture

Hi all,

I'll chime in again, as Webmin themes are a favorite subject of mine.

The StressFree theme looks fantastic! I had never seen it until now...I'm shocked it never came to my attention. I'm really impressed--and having made several complete overhaul (new icons, new stylesheets, new ui_ functions, etc.) themes myself, I know how darned much work it really is. I like the Nuvola icons better, though I understand the developer's choice not to use them--when we started, Nuvola was not large enough to cover all of Webmin, so we had to hire David to make a lot of new icons to fill it out (which have generally been merged into the official Nuvola sets). I tried to keep paying him to work on more, but his studies and other projects have so far kept him from taking me up on it.

Webmin really uses too many icons to be easy to theme...but that's getting to be less of a problem as it gets more ui_ oriented rather than HTML-in-Perl, and so it's becoming more feasible to replace icons with nice stylesheets, borders, and cool stuff like that. Makes for a faster user experience, without necessarily losing any of the eye candy factor. My two icon sets took about a month each of pretty steady effort...a theme shouldn't take that long! Luckily, this is a problem that strikes all GUI software, so there's been a lot of cool work in making it possible to create a "map" of icons such that any icon set with standard naming conventions can be mapped into any project. At some point, we'll be able to choose "Virtualmin-Nuvola green style, small Crystal icons, and a navigation bar on the left" rather than having to choose a monolithic theme. We'll be dealing with this in the short term with a dozen or so variations on our Virtualmin-Nuvola theme, including one with a navigation frame and others with different colors.

The Virtualmin Nuvola theme will be available for free at some not too distant future (though it's new as-yet-unreleased derivative may not be for a while...like Virtualmin itself, we're trailing development of the Professional production, so as to provide strong differentiation between the GPL product and the Professional, branded, product). I have not yet had time to package it up, swap out the Virtualmin Professional trademarks for some other images, and come up with a suitable license.

Also worth mentioning, we plan to sponsor an annual developer contest here at Virtualmin.com with the best themes and best modules by a third party developer winning some fabulous prizes (prizes yet to be determined, but it'll certainly be something good). That'll come once we've got the product in a state that we're thoroughly happy with (no major bugs in the tracker, no major OS unsupported). I'd expect something in 4 months or so, when we run out of obvious things to write press releases about. ;-)

Anyway, the answer is yes, Virtualmin-Nuvola will be available for free in some form as soon as I can find the time to do a release. And several other cool enhancements to Webmin themeability in general will also go into not-too-distant versions of Webmin. I'd like to be in a world where Virtualmin-Nuvola is not the only really nice looking theme (and I'm ecstatic that it seems to already be happening with StressFree!), and I'd even be happy to find that Virtualmin-Nuvola isn't even in the top ten best looking themes...but we've got to make themeing easier and more productive to get some artists interested in the task (right now I have to pay them or do it myself, which isn't so bad, but the expense or the time adds up fast!). ;-)

Just in case anyone else has been living under a rock like me and hasn't seen StressFree, I'll save you the Google: http://www.stress-free.co.nz/content/view/141/82/

And it looks like webmin.thirdpartymodules.com is back up and running, hooray! Good news all around tonight.

Back to the ol' x86_64 grindstone (tomorrow will see the release of RH/CentOS/Fedora 64 bit versions)...

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Tue, 11/15/2005 - 18:20
MartinNicholls

Yeah, I love that stressfree theme, it's really nice to work with.. stress-free you might say ;)

As for themability enhancements in future webmin versions, that will be great - I've never actually looked at how the themes are done, but any improvememnts in such things are always good news.

I'd probably create some themes myself if I had the time - but I'm already an active developer on 3 major open source projects (one is e107 but the other two are secret squirrel unreleased projects that i'd have to kill you if i told you about). However in a few months I should have a lower work-load, so I might be up for that competition, and I know a few very tallented site designers that probably would be too, so if it happens - though around that time i'll probably have a crack at a tidy css based theme (probably standards based, if it's possible - i'm xhtml 1.1 obsessed).

Anyways, it all sounds good, I just wish I could code Webmin modules in PHP - my PERL experience is limited to say the least, but nvm, keep up the good work! :)

Tue, 11/15/2005 - 20:45 (Reply to #9)
Joe
Joe's picture

Hey Martin,

It is possible to write Webmin modules in PHP, using the PHP port of web-lib.pl. But it isn't complete or up to date. It would probably depend pretty heavily on what you're trying to accomplish--simple modules would be possible, but more complex stuff probably wouldn't. And you'll probably end up writing more code than necessary. I've never used it, as I don't speak PHP at all, but I have looked over it a bit and can say with certainty that it is a bit aged (it pre-dates the division of web-lib.pl into two parts and the introduction of ui-lib.pl) and was probably not complete when it was new.

But if you just wanted to whip something up it would probably work fine:

http://www.webmin.com/modules-others.html

There is also a Python version, for any snake-handlers among us. All of that said, I suspect that unless you have pretty strong reasons for choosing an alternate language (like you have a large existing codebase that you'd like to integrate into Webmin modules), I would think learning enough Perl to wing it would be more productive than dealing with the deficiencies of the alternate language web-lib versions. I learned Perl predominantly by writing Webmin modules, and it's still my biggest use of Perl six years later.

It's also worth noting that you can write code that calls Virtualmin in any language. All you need is the ability to call out to the shell or make web requests. So, if you were writing a billing system, or a webserver cluster management system, or who knows what else, and wanted to integrate it with Virtualmin, you could do so no matter what the language. And, if you find something that the command line or remote APIs don't address, holler and we'll get it in there. API requests get fast attention from Jamie, as we're taking third party developers very seriously.

Anyway, I'll stop rambling about developing for Webmin now and get back to doing some developing. ;-)

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Tue, 11/15/2005 - 22:03
MartinNicholls

Ah, thanks for the recomendation - I managed to find the sf.net project page for it - cvs seems to be dead for the last 6 months, but there was a release about then, http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=89523 - I might check it out and see if it's any use :)

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