We’re working on custom environment tags and and colors for your servers and I wanted to get some feedback from you about how you would use this feature.
For some background, at the moment OttoFMS has a set of 14 colors and 3 environment tags (dev, stg, prod) to choose from when customizing your server appearance and how you see it when using that server in OttoDeploy and the Cloud Console.
Currently, the color of the environment tag badge is directly related to which environment tag you have chose, green for dev, yellow for stg, and red for prod. In the process of creating custom tags, there are a few options for the color of this badge.
We could keep the current paradigm and have the green, yellow, and red, with a fourth color (blue or yellow or orange perhaps) which would denote that it was a custom tag. The downside here is that you would not be able to differentiate between your custom tags by color.
Make the environment badges the same color as the server color. This would make it so that your server color and your environment tag were more closely linked, so identifying by color would be entirely in your hands rather than hard-coded in. However, the color of your server and the color of your environment would be tied together.
The most customizable option would be to make it so that you could choose a custom server color, custom environment tag, and a color for the environment tag itself. This would give you full control of all of the colors and tags everywhere, but it puts the onus of matching everything on you rather than performing some magic in OttoFMS. The downside here is that there are now a lot of custom settings which might get confusing for new users who are not managing a ton of servers.
Let me know what would give y’all the full functionality you’re looking for here!
Initial thoughts
Well this depends in which mode you are using of course.
I tend to prefer light mode, in list view so the colour bar at the left is of course thin and the tag stands out more, but then switching to card mode there is more colour on the server and the tag is the same size, so can be a little lost
The order of preference is definitely to get more tags, whether that is by you providing them or us having a list (say 6) that we can define, which would include their colour.
On the beginner vs advanced confusion. This feels like a preference, like the advanced options for a deployment. If you select and apply ‘basic’ mode you get only the current colour picker and only three tags. If you have advanced selected then it should remove any custom tags and make all servers a base colour (along with appropriate warning)
If you choose advanced then the colour picker should include your (6) selected at the same time as you select a tag colour. The tag colour should only be selectable from the place where you edit the name, but there should be (6) slots for server colours, and the selector should show its regular and dark alternatives.
Even if you reduced this to 3 or 4 it would provide a massive improvement to the general flexibility of OCC particularly. One of things that I would love to address is not being fixed(limited) to your choice of language. given an estate of more than 10 servers, it may not be that one if only and always a Dev server. It might have a dev file that you want to push out to clients or other instances you control, but another server I have may also act as both live and dev for a different file. Example here, I have a client with two different companies and two Servers, so I can use each one to be the dev for the other company to not do work on the live server.
I now it’s also more ‘work’ but selecting the tag colour could also select an outline colour (black or white) so that it would matter less if you had chosen two colours close to each other or with little contrast.
I was thinking that the custom color that you picked would come from a defined list of colors provided by our UI library. These colors are designed to work in light mode or dark mode, so I don’t think we would also expose an outline color.
Would you be ok with these list of colors (likely the same set as in the theme color picker)?
I would say number two. Match the environment tags to the chosen server color. I love having the colors available (even if limited) because it really helps define which server is which to avoid unfortunate mistakes. How many times have we confused one FM Admin Console from another simply because the looked the same‽
Also, for whatever reason, staging color is green, and production color is blue (I think this started with terminal server windows). Dev tend to be orange.
This leads to the real complicated option of number three. Lots of choices lots of opportunities to get confused. I like this option as well.
@eric.luce - yes, am not looking for massive list of colour I can select, just some more than available now.
Are you using all the available colours in the current theme picker??
Why are black and white not part of the set, or at least ivory and charcoal…?
We are excluding “gray” and “dark” currently because it’s too difficult to make all the headings and other UI elements look good in both light and dark mode. All other colors are already shown in the theme color picker
I think the way we’re going to go with this is that the environment tag will be customizable and the color will default to the current color of the server. However, the color will be customizable as well, so that you can choose whatever color you’d like. It straddles between options 2 and 3 slightly, but I think gets the best of both worlds. This feature will be included with our next release of OttoFMS!