Symphony.

I'm not a fan of the "Create at hh:mm" format of 2.0.1. I think the time is unnecessary information in this context, so adds clutter.

Some previous version had timestamps in the saved messages, and I was the idiot who said to get rid of them. Ostentisbly, I might not have been an idiot back then, but I'd have ruined my non-idiot track record by changing my mind and suggesting to add them back again.

I absolutely don't want messages that disappear after some period of time, for the reason that I want to know whether the form I'm looking at has been saved or not. Timestamps assist with this goal because I hopefully have a memory of how long it's been since I made changes to said form, and I can calculate whether this is before the time that form was last saved.

Consider Gmail's "(11 minutes ago)" message on e-mails. I find this to be indispensable information. I think it would definitely be an improvement to Symphony's messages to replace the timestamp with a javascripted time-ago counter, and Gmail is an excellent example of good UI/workflow paradigms.

At the moment, I'm only interested in making minimal changes to S2 since I want to focus as much of my time as possible on S3. Nick, if you or anyone else wants to take a more prominent role in improving Symphony's status messages, I'm sure the community would greatly appreciate it.

In S3, I'm considering more fundamental improvements to status messages, such as showing a larger "things you can do with this entry" block (moving it just below the H2, as Simone suggested), with actions like creating linked entries. At this stage, I don't really know what's best for status messages, so suggestions or experiments from the community will probably be very helpful.

I absolutely don't want messages that disappear after some period of time, for the reason that I want to know whether the form I'm looking at has been saved or not. [...] I think it would definitely be an improvement to Symphony's messages to replace the timestamp with a javascripted time-ago counter, and Gmail is an excellent example of good UI/workflow paradigms.

I understand your idea of keeping track of things and I think a relative time will be much more helpful than the current timestamp. Now that we have colored system messages, what about not hiding the page alert but changing a green success notice to a standard grey one after a while? This way is would be visually clear that you did not save an entry just now but you could still see that it was saved and when it was saved.

I send a pull request to Alistair last week but didn't hear anything. I'm a git newbie, so may have done something wrong...

I've applied it, and a bunch of other changes people have made, to the integration branch. Will be releasing 2.0.2 patch next week for everyone not on Git.

Now that we have colored system messages, what about not hiding the page alert but changing a green success notice to a standard grey one after a while?

I played around with the system messages and changed the javascript to fade the success message from green to grey after 5 seconds. The colors are quite the same as in the current release (so they are different to those Nick posted) because the borders used where a bit problematic in connection with my javascript solution. I attach the changed script and style files - please try it out and post what you are thinking of this version. The files have to be copied to symphony/assets/.

Nils, good work. I think there might be a way of supporting borders as well, by reusing the fade anything technique (FAT). It would be nice to support my colour changes and the borders too.

There are 3 states in my updated CSS:

• normal (no class attribute, grey)
• green (@class="success")
• amber (@class="error")

It'd be great if success/error then fade back down to the 'normal' grey style.

The alternative is to make more use of the header, to the right of the site name. The system message could appear floated right. This would allow us to fade completely without affecting the rest of the page.

I'm not happy with this for several reasons:

• Nowhere else are right-floated UI elements used
• Other elements are aligned left and are full-width
• Messages can be long (permissions errors for example) and browser widths can be narrow

I do like the idea of putting the message under the H2. This would work especially well for form validation. A bullet list of the validation errors of a form is often seen as good practice:

However this only works for validation messages, and not a catch-all for "system" messages. System messages can include things permissions errors, which aren't necessarily relevant in the context of an entry form.

In S3 is the distinction between error messages made? I'd argue that "system" messages would be displayed in a different context to task-based entry/data related messages.

Nils, good work. I think there might be a way of supporting borders as well, by reusing the fade anything technique (FAT). It would be nice to support my colour changes and the borders too.

I wasn't sure if it would be a bit too much to really write or use code that transforms one color to an other as this is not needed anywhere else in the system. That's why I'm just using a duplicated element that changes opacity. I think this results in just 10 lines of code or so.

Concerning my "border problem": It would be absolutely no problem if the system message were positioned absolutely at { top: 0; left: 0; } but I'm not yet sure why there is this strange negative margin concept for the page alerts. So I took the easy way as it was late yesterday.

One thing I noticed while using your color scheme in real live is that if you have the maintenance mode extension enabled and you always have a notice visible is seems to be too light and visually present to me.

Concerning the other places of notices:

• I don't like the idea of floated messages as I think it really doesn't fit into the design concept of the admin area.
• But I do like the idea of inline notices for validation errors. As you said this does not work for system messages, but it's a good idea. The only thing we should keep in mind is that the interface would become more complex with a distinction of messages and I think it was the idea of the Symphony team to add as little clutter as possible.

I know this is an old thread but I have pushed a few changes to my Symphony fork at Github:

1. System messages will fade to grey after 10 seconds.
2. System messages with relative times.