Hoping to gather some feedback on this before progressing. The intention is to update the Settings (Manage Jenkins) page to use a sidebar rather than the current icon view.
I am rarely using this pages at all. But it makes sense to move everything to the side panel. I think the concept of the tiled buttons before is not used in any other Jenkins place.
What happens if those sub-pages have a side panel as well?
One possibility would be to make the sidepanels of those pages behave like subtasks, e.g. on freestyle job page the wipe workspace is a subtask of the workspace
On the other hand Nodes and Clouds has also widgets with the executors below, so there this subtasks won’t be an option.
I think that the easiest approach for views that have their own defined sidebars is to leave them be for the time being (e.g. Plugins), then if there’s a need look into a different approach (e.g. like the sidebar item children posted by Markus).
The nodes page will definitely need some tweaking, the sidebar actions can move to the app bar fairly easily
One thing to think about is where notifications go, I currently have them appearing in the System page -
Whether this is the best approach I’m not sure.
Can’t we move these messages to a new page that has a task in the sidebar panel as well (with a badge)? Maybe the top most item before System Configuration?
I actually like the current tiles with corresponding help text, which is especially useful for not so experienced Jenkins users.
What should rather be improved is the “Configure System” page itself, which might get quite long and benefit from having a sidebar for its categories (like Maven Project Configuration, Global properties etc.).
