One of our goals in developing EOS is to provide a more focused and usable interface in the Administration tool.  We have taken a few small steps in that direction within the past week.

First, we added the display of the customer ID number in the left most column of the Customer Listing page.  This will  allow rapid access to the information, though it will not allow changing the ID number itself which remains the index for the customer system.  This will become a standard feature for all database objects as development continues.  No more checking the URL to find out the customer, product, category or order ID.

Another change was the movement of the edit and preview icons back into the "Action" column of the listing.  While these icons had been separated from the info icon in the interests of avoiding accidental misclicks we prefer to use larger icons with slightly more spacing.  This allows us to concentrate icons which act directly on specific data objects in one consistent location that support direct action - reducing click counts and improving efficiency.   Expect this to be implemented gradually throughout the admin - with a few twists to accomodate a type of display which osCommerce has never had.

The issue I am referring to is listing displays that deal with objects existing in the file system.  At the moment, we have to deal with Templates, General Files and Media Gallery objects which need to be linked to database objects for purposes of control or content attachment. This has led to some rather awkward descriptions of the object state in the current release.  One item on our agenda for the near future is to replace those descriptions with action focused icons that reflect the current relationship between the data object and the file object, and clearly indicate the actions that can be applied next.

One major development this week was an offer from Pithy Productions to supply design services to help meet this need.  So - look for significant progress in the user interface within the next month or so.