New Talawa Admin Features and Designs

[palisadoes]

Share your ideas for new features and designs here.

[adi-uchiha]

@palisadoes @rishav-jha-mech @anwersayeed

Using bootstrap a correct decision?
These are the possible shortcomings

• Bootstrap comes with pre-defined classes. So there no overhead of design. This project should involve build a custom design that will suit the ideology of talawa.
• Bootstrap is generally used for rapid development of a decent looking UI, for a long term project it is simply not well suited. Bootstrap's components and styles follow a specific design aesthetic. If our project requires a unique and distinct visual identity, Bootstrap may not be the best choice. While it is possible to override or customize Bootstrap's styles, doing so can be complex and time-consuming, potentially hampering long-term design flexibility.
• Bootstrap is not extensible. If you need to add custom features or functionality, you may find it difficult to do so without modifying the core Bootstrap code.
• Bootstrap does not provide a calendar component which is the backbone of the event feature. Currently the calender is very underdeveloped lot of work is on the list for that too. If we decide to use another library for that? Just like this, with every new features in talawa, we will suffer from bottleneck of bootstrap. The front end will again be bloated with just UI libraries.

My Opinion -
Tailwind was a great alternative, its rapid growth in popularity supports this statement.
Alternatives for the unstyled UI libraries were mantine, Daisyui etc We should be using a Library of unstyled UI components which supports typescript and tailwind (as these are where the industry is shifting towards) like mantine. It is open source, the source code is available, and well written, we can start to make our own UI library from that, like other open source project does example: https://rocketchat.github.io/fuselage/fuselage/master/?path=/story/inputs-iconbutton--variants
This would have been really beneficial for the future of talawa. Because as more feature and functionalities will come in, bootstrap components will will not be enough. Possibilities were endless but from developer point of view bootstrap is a very simple solution to complete this project, but we'll need to leave bootstrap later, migrating will be another overhead. With time the admin panel will be much more complex. The dashboard will have more metric and data analysis, the calendar will get complex as we will add support for mobile interface, but the again, if we used another package for calendar, adding new features might be a troublesome. Like if we want to add drag and drop for the calendar events and the package do not have that feature already?
I understand the time constraints and limitation but sacrificing all good possibilities is not worth it.

[anwersayeed]

Bootstrap has the excellent documentation and great community support. We cannot add tailwind without making a breaking change to the website, and as there are other developers who have even started to work on the project, their work will be affected if we switch to tailwind.

Bootstrap is not extensible but it is customizable, we can customize it to our needs. It is currently the right fit for our project.

[rishav-jha-mech]

Here is the Figma Design for the Admin UI.

https://www.figma.com/file/Qf4Ys6AjMyKciR11eQ7L6Q/Talawa-Admin-UI-Redesign?type=design&node-id=0%3A1&mode=design&t=4djDEaVXruZ7BUss-1

Comments and Suggestions are welcome !

[adi-uchiha]

Great Work

[adi-uchiha]

@rishav-jha-mech Just noticed that the logo are big and not in expandable format. They were blur. I traced them to vector format. You can use them. Here is the figma link and svg files.
https://www.figma.com/file/UEygJJsZxAQRPPw3XR5elX/Palisadoes-Logo-SVG?type=design&node-id=4%3A45&mode=design&t=EaoW3SSUpOfPAk0J-1
@palisadoes you can use this for the landing page too