Does a better ui exist? Are PRs welcome?

[mkoryak]

First, thank you for making this library. Maintaining a big open source project is not easy and I appreciate the work you put in.

I think we can agree that the current frontend is absolutely bare bones. It gets the job done but could use some small enhancements like back button support and.. many other things :)

I noticed that there is support for adding your own frontend index.html. does that mean that you won't accept PRs to "official frontend"?

Do other frontends exist somewhere and I haven't found them yet? I found one that requires a docker server..

If I were to submit a PR, do you have any advice on how to have a good time getting it merged?

[Mr-Dave]

The PR would have to be using the git version(5.0 rather than 4.7).

I was thinking that the UI would be HTML/javascript and use the webcontrol_interface and webcontrol_html options.

Any samples/alternatives would be distributed in the docs directory rather than re-coded into C++ (I'm seriously considering just removing the C++ coded html page and instead just have the default read from a configuration directory). I've been trying to put together a better page specifically around configuration changes but haven't had the time to finish it.

If it is just revised sample html and scripts, then that would be an easy pull to get in. Just not sure right now on the timeline of getting version 5.0 put out into a release. If it requires spinning up a docker container to work, then I'd say that the merge may not happen. Too many additional dependencies/things to maintain.

If all you want is a different webui, then you could also check out Motioneye. I'm not sure of their development or release status or whether they ever resolved the Python 2.7 to 3 induced fiasco. (I think they were stuck on 2.7 for a while)

[mkoryak]

No, I would not use docker. I was giving that as an example of a ui I found and won't be using because i don't want dependencies like that. We are on the same page here.

I haven't looked at how your html is created yet, I assumed it was just stored as html. I will do my homework now that I know you're active and will accept PRs. I will target v5 and start small.

One thing that I may need help with is understanding which options depend on others. Some of that knowledge is not clear even after reading the docs. I'll cross that bridge when I need to and ask questions here.

Thanks

[Mr-Dave]

Attached is the base web page that is created by the C++ code and can be just modified and specified as a "user" provided html page. Note that the page does need to be stored in a webcontrol subdirectory of the motion configuration as indicated in the motion guide section for webcontrol_html (The guide that is installed rather than the one on the home screen of the Motion-Project)

samplepage.html

Also note that the recent code does allow retrieving additional resources. So the page source so it doesn't all have to be in a single file. e.g

<link rel="stylesheet" href="style.css">
<script type="text/javascript" src="test.js"></script>