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Style guidelines

This document is here to help style standards for contributions towards LibreNMS. These aren't strict rules but it is in the users interest that a consistent well thought out Web UI is available.

Responsiveness

The Web UI is designed to be mobile friendly and for the most part is and works well. It's worth spending some time to read through the Bootstrap website to learn more about how to keep things responsive.

  • Always pick the best location for new links to go; think about where users would expect the link to be located and name it so that it's obvious what it does.

  • Ensure sub-sections within the Navigation are separated correctly using <li role="presentation" class="divider"></li>.

  • Only use Font Awesome icons within the Navigation. It speeds up page load times quite considerably.

Buttons

Try to keep buttons colored to reflect the action they will take. Buttons are set using Bootstrap classes. The size of the buttons will depend on the area of the website being used but btn-sm is probably the most common.

  • Delete / Remove buttons: btn btn-danger

  • Edit / Update buttons: btn btn-primary

  • Add / Create buttons: btn btn-success

Tables

Unless the table being used will only ever display a handful of items - yeah that's what we all said, then you need to write your table using JQuery Bootgrid. This shouldn't take that much more code to do it, but provides so much flexibility along with stopping the need for retrieving all the data from SQL in the first place.

As an example pull request, see PR 706 to get an idea of what it's like to convert an existing pure html table to Bootgrid.

Datetime format

When displaying datetimes, please ensure you use the format YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss where possible, you shouldn't change the order of this as it will be confusing to users. Cutting it short to just display YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm is fine :).

To keep things consistent we have the following variables which should be used rather than to format dates yourself. This has the added benefit that users can customise the format:

# Date format for PHP date()s
$config['dateformat']['long']                             = "r"; # RFC2822 style
$config['dateformat']['compact']                          = "Y-m-d H:i:s";
$config['dateformat']['byminute']                         = "Y-m-d H:i";
$config['dateformat']['time']                             = "H:i:s";

# Date format for MySQL DATE_FORMAT
$config['dateformat']['mysql']['compact']                 = "%Y-%m-%d %H:%i:%s";
$config['dateformat']['mysql']['date']                 = "%Y-%m-%d";
$config['dateformat']['mysql']['time']                 = "%H:%i:%s";