Overview

Covers some improvements ideas that could be applied to left panels area: 

• Mark "More applications" as expandable 
• Provide a "Customize" panel button on hover
• Some styling changes
• Demo: show sticky left panels would behave

Before

After

Expandable "More applications"

•  Mark that "More applications" is expandable by using an arrow

• Expanded state
• Using the same bullets, arrows and colors as Tree

• XWIKI-14884 issue suggested to also have App Index and Customize panel listed in the "More applications" section
  • "Manage panel" could be represented as a hover button (see next section)
  • "All applications" could remain listed just in the Drawer, with the other Indexes

"Customize" button on hover

• Display a "Customize" button on panel hover that will take the user to admin/XWiki/XWikiPreferences?editor=globaladmin&section=panels.applications

• Hovering the button will also display it's label "Customize" / "Configure" / "Manage"

• "Navigation" panel will also have a button taking the user to admin/XWiki/XWikiPreferences?editor=globaladmin&section=panels.navigation
• This way both panels will have a similar way to customize them
• The customisation button will be visible just by Global Admins that have access to the Administration

Other Idea: Sticky Left Panels

• There were some discussions about having the panels and content area in individual containers that could scroll independently.
  • In this particular example just Left Panels is independent. Content and Right Panels are preserving the current behavior.
• Another idea was to make the left panels sticky. This would be useful especially for KBs that use Navigation panel intensively. This is how the panels would behave.
  • Still the current skin layout is problematic since the logo is not visible when scrolling. Fixing the navbar would be too much, especially since we have bottom fixed bar for Save in Edit mode. 

GIF

Scrolling