Help Plan the Future of Universal Dashboard!

adam · February 7, 2020, 4:59am

I’ve been pretty bad about planning for UD. It’s mostly been centered around what I thought was cool and what I thought the community wanted. Let’s change that.

I want to come up with a more formal roadmap for UD. I have some direction in mind and would love to hear what everyone thinks.

I’ve committed a roadmap.md file to the Universal Dashboard repository.

github.com

ironmansoftware/universal-dashboard/blob/master/roadmap.md

# v3 - Late 2020 

## Framework Support 

Universal Dashboard currently uses Materialize CSS as it's primary set of controls. It isn't React based and really locks people into a single look and feel. We've made some progress at switching this out but it's not complete. 

We should be able to completely plug in a framework that changes the control set. Certain controls should be backwards compatible and only change how they look. The following cmdlets should work no matter the framework. 

- New-UDCard
- New-UDCounter
- New-UDGrid 
- New-UDTable 
- New-UDInput
- New-UDChart
- New-UDRow
- New-UDColumn
- More? 


Frameworks should be able to define their own controls but should some how allow for backwards compabiltiy of the above controls.

This file has been truncated. show original

I’d like to treat this as a living document that we can all help contribute to. I’ve outlined the direction I would like to take over the next year. It’s merely a start and things can change but I see many of the features as really important for both for the improvement in quality as well as the ease in maintenance going forward.

If you have changes you’d like to see to this roadmap, please feel free to submit a PR and we can discuss it. I’m happy to discuss either on the forums or within GitHub issues.

augustin.ziegler · February 9, 2020, 1:28pm

@adam Great idea to start the Roadmap.md, here are some questions from my side before contributing:

Can we add forum or GH links to the topic in order to see more related stuff (discussions and progress - GH)?

I would love to see a Github issue cleanup, as in my opinion to improve the product we should resolve or add basic needs from the community. I outlined some of them:

And maybe we should add a “table of content” to the Roadmap.md to in order to have an overview.
Also the separate the data would be great as I can expect to be very full - something like

v3 - Late 2020

Core

Components

REST API

v2.+ - 2020

Core

Components

REST API

adam · February 10, 2020, 5:19pm

Thanks for calling out these issues. I think including “evidence” (issues\forum posts) about particular features is a great idea. It helps show what everyone is really after in terms of fixes and features.

Table of contents is also a great idea. I think that once we add a big list of issues\forum posts to this document, it will be hard to read.

cadayton · February 28, 2020, 3:51am

One concern or feature to request is more compatibility between releases. All of my past upgrades have resulted in some breakage. In 2.9.0+ I believe there is some enforcement as to where $Session variables can be declared (endpoints only). This wasn’t enforced on prior releases. Fewer surprises is better is all I’m trying to say.

adam · February 28, 2020, 4:19am

Honestly, this the primary focus of v3. I think the v2 -> v3 will be a big change and require some rework of existing dashboards but all the v3 components will implement a common underlying framework providing more consistency, the theme engine will not rely on overarching CSS which can ripple through controls causing unexpected side effects and the use of newer technologies will avoid having to write our own implementation of controls that already exist in the react ecosystem thus avoiding having to solve solved problems.

The other big focus has been on testing. We’ve already improved the speed and scope of our testing and the test suite should be much more robust than the previous version.

I hated all the breaking changes between releases and it’s one of the reasons I decided to pull the trigger on the v3 version. I was literally starting to go crazy trying to ensure that nothing was broken each release (and failing).

All in all, I’m super excited to release a way more stable, way more capable version of UD so I can finally get some sleep.