aethelwulffe wrote on Saturday, May 02, 2015:
Reorganizing the Globals config gui…input?
https://github.com/aethelwulffe/SunCoast_OpenEMR/commit/05e18ac0e2e6f908e36a6c530e885bfac6637b22
aethelwulffe wrote on Saturday, May 02, 2015:
Reorganizing the Globals config gui…input?
https://github.com/aethelwulffe/SunCoast_OpenEMR/commit/05e18ac0e2e6f908e36a6c530e885bfac6637b22
bradymiller wrote on Saturday, May 02, 2015:
Hi,
Would there be a big benefit to this? A trade off that should be considered is that the documentation will be more difficult to maintain:
http://www.open-emr.org/wiki/index.php/Settings_lists
(Probably best to focus the time on the documentation and consistency/maintainability than the ordering of the items on the globals gui.)
-brady
OpenEMR
aethelwulffe wrote on Saturday, May 02, 2015:
I don’t agree that it is unimportant.
The benefit to new users/installers should be obvious. Documentation is trivial…when the material itself is organized. In this case, the material is very disorganized (and not very friendly). I myself have to search through, tinker with, puzzle on, and do the “uh, I wonder if they mean…”. New users (meaning admin/self installers) should have it better than that.
I think this is low-hanging fruit here, and I feel it should be fixed. How valuable is it? I think very: at least for folks looking at setting up the system for the first time ever. Even if someone does not agree with that statement (probably because they have not looked at the whole with fresh eyes for a long time), then this is what is called ‘maintenance’. Every once in a while you should clean up your room when you have been very messy for a long time.
The documentation you linked to is incomplete, ‘under construction’ and is not very friendly. It is also related to the same jumbled order in the UI, making it mostly unreadable. Trust me, if all it takes is a wiki page or two to make you happy, that is no problem. I figured I would handle it in the html docs, but I will pass off the text for your wiki.
There is a lot more that should be done here. From how I see it, there should be about 12 tabs (not fifteen), with some menu divisions.
You get more out of a system if optimization is intuitive. Most folks have no idea what and where this stuff is. They need to be able to explore the system. What they find there is so jumbled, it is off-putting (this is the feedback that started me on this).
I certainly disagree that ‘consistency’ would be affected. No one uses the documentation until the get desperate. If it is presented in an organized fashion, then they never get desperate. “Entropy” is the current consistency, thus: nothing to maintain. Why perpetuate legacy for its own sake? Strike a blow for acceptable technical writing.
aethelwulffe wrote on Saturday, May 02, 2015:
A more concise statement:
Feedback prompted these changes.
Documentation would not be harder to maintain. You change it once, and you are done. This does not add maintenance. Collated interfaces make explaining the material easier, which is the job of documentation. That means documentation maintenance is actually easier.
I feel that a LOT more of this sort of thing is needed to bring the code base up to a professional standard. There is no glory in any one bit of it, but I feel we need to start thinking this way a lot more often.
bradymiller wrote on Sunday, May 03, 2015:
Hi Art,
It’s not my wiki:
http://www.open-emr.org/wiki/index.php/Special:ActiveUsers
A google search for most of those settings will land a user to the wiki settings page.
Note there were two reasons for creating the settings page:
Renaming something to make it more clear makes sense, but ensure it is worth it, because that will become a new term for the translators (there are now more than 6800 terms to be translated):
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/openemr/translations_development_openemr/master/stats.txt
Moving to another section that is more applicable makes sense to, but then need to show it was moved on the wiki page:
(this setting was moved to LINK in OpenEMR version…)
Regarding an overhaul, note I wouldn’t be against this if the overhauler did everything including the necessary wiki documentation, and it was an improvement. In my opinion, it’s a lot of work for very minimal benefit(I can’t recall one time that this has been considered an issue on the forums), which is why the overhauler will get to do all of the work
-brady
OpenEMR
fsgl wrote on Sunday, May 03, 2015:
There are times when it is difficult to remember which Globals setting is in which tab without going through all of them.
Globals layout is not a burning question for the average user because the major task is installation followed by navigation. Fortunately with a few changes in Globals, the average user is able to go to work.
If the reorganized Globals can be in one of Brady’s Up for Grabs Demo’s, users can join this conversation.
The Wiki may seem at times chaotic & disorganized, but this is the nature of various folks adding articles at different times. Brady acts as editor-in-chief but there are not enough hours in the day to do the job perfectly.
For the most part there is a concerted effort to clarify & update articles that concern most users. Following Rod’s example we have deployed plenty of screenshots to help the user better understand the concepts. We have embedded videos as well. Feedback from the Fora is used to improve the Wiki.
fsgl wrote on Sunday, May 03, 2015:
However brilliantly a module is constructed or organized, I don’t think that it would be so user-friendly or intuitive that no documentation is necessary. Andy Grove once remarked that a computer should be as easy to use as a landline, but to this day that is not the case.
The neophyte, even with decades of experience from such diverse disciplines such as Accounting, Computer Science & Medicine will not master OpenEMR without documentation via the Wiki or the Fora.
Medicine is a particularly difficult field, otherwise there would be no need to spend 8 plus years in post-graduate education.
tmccormi wrote on Wednesday, May 06, 2015:
I agree with Art that it needs to be cleaned up and sorted out. Updating the wiki to match is equally important. Frankly I think it is now dumping ground for all kinds of configurations that could be better organized around their functional areas… but that is a bigger project.
OpenEMR 5… reboot.
–Tony
aethelwulffe wrote on Wednesday, May 06, 2015:
Let’s just say the following: