ARA 1.5.6 has been released and you can try it out with the getting started guide or by checking out the live demo at https://demo.recordsansible.org.
For the full list of changes, see the changelog on GitHub as well as the list of commits since 1.5.5.
It’s been a while since the last release highlight for 1.5.0 but you can catch up on changelogs and release notes for every version until now in the documentation.
1.5.6 features a refresh of the playbook reporting interface included with the API server and here you can find some of the highlights.
A refreshed UI
We’ve switched to the bootstrap CSS framework which made it possible to theme the interface with bootswatch:
There's a lot of open source Bootstrap CSS themes out there, like the ones from https://t.co/fvZFoaIsNI
— ARA Records Ansible (@RecordsAnsible) March 15, 2021
Maybe you could pick darkly for a dark theme or sketchy for a fun one :) pic.twitter.com/mKcHqp0vqy
There are some fun themes (like sketchy) but we ended up settling for flatly for the default light theme and darkly as the dark theme.
The first implementation for themes was configured in the server’s settings but it wasn’t great because users could not change the theme from their browser. Thanks to the help of Guillaume Vincent we ended up implementing a toggle in the interface which persists across page loads and it works great:
Dark/light theme toggle moved to the browser at the top right and looks great after a few tweaks \o/ pic.twitter.com/NfAqbGevhi
— ARA Records Ansible (@RecordsAnsible) April 11, 2021
It turns out that the themes have a shade of green which gives the interface a bit more personality and is closer to the ara logo.
I prefer the dark theme myself but some have already told me they preferred the light one.
To each their own and that’s alright :)
A different mobile interface
We didn’t particularly spend a lot of time on the mobile use case for now but the interface at least needed to be usable.
It now behaves differently than it used to and I personally like it better this way:
And bootstrap lets you scroll the tables horizontally instead: pic.twitter.com/RVshrcGcni
— ARA Records Ansible (@RecordsAnsible) March 14, 2021
Iterations, iterations, iterations…
The data that is available in the interface is the same as before but the way it’s presented has been generally improved by iterating, iterating and iterating:
After a few more iterations on the UI refresh, before and after of a playbook report: pic.twitter.com/eIdpFT8JBu
— ARA Records Ansible (@RecordsAnsible) March 24, 2021
And then some more iterations after that – tweaking colors, heights, alignments, modals and so on – got us to a point where it was “good enough” to ship.
Special thanks to @hille721 on GitHub who contributed a lot of feedback and ideas throughout issues and pull requests while we were iterating !
That’s it for now !
There’s plenty of work left to do but it will need to be in a future release !
Want to contribute, chat or need help ?
ARA could use your help and we can also help you get started. Please reach out !
The project community hangs out on IRC and Slack.
You can also stay up to date on the latest news and development by following @RecordsAnsible on Twitter.