This blog post gives an introduction to the new design for the login and signup forms and Jenkins is (re)starting pages introduced in Jenkins 2.128.
The first part of the blog post is an introduction to the new design and UX for Jenkins users.
The later part is talking about extensibility in a more technical manner, aimed at plugin developers.
Overview
The recent changes to some core pages provide new design and UX and further dropping all external dependencies to prevent
any possible malicious javascript introduced by third party libraries.
To be clear, this never was an issue with previous releases of Jenkins, but having read this article, this author believes that the article has good points and leading by example may raise awareness of data protection.
This meant to drop the usage of the jelly layout lib (aka xmlns:l="/lib/layout") and as well the page decorators it
supported. However there is a new SimplePageDecorator extension point (discussed below) which can be used to modify the look and feel for the login and sign up page.
The following pages have given a new design:
Jenkins is (re)starting pages
Login
Sign up
UX enhancement
Form validation has changed to give inline feedback about data validation errors in the same form.
Login
Sign up
The above image shows that the validation is now done on all input fields instead of before breaking on the
first error found, which should lead to fewer retry cycles.
Instead of forcing the user to repeat the password, the new UX introduces the possibility to display the password in
clear text. Further a basic password strength meter indicates password strength to the user while she enters the password.
Customizing the UI
The re-/starting screens do not support the concept of decorators very well, hence the decision to not support them for these pages.
The SimplePageDecorator is the key component for customization and uses three different files to
allow overriding the look and feel of the login and signup pages.
simple-head.jelly
simple-header.jelly
simple-footer.jelly
All of the above SimplePageDecorator Jelly files are supported in the login page. The following snippet is a minimal excerpt
of the login page, showing how it makes use of SimplePageDecorator.
The sign-up page only supports the simple-head.jelly:
SimplePageDecorator - custom implementations
Have a look at Login Theme Plugin, which allows you to
configure your own custom content to be injected into the new login/sign-up page.
To allow easy customisation the decorator only implements one instance by the principal "first-come-first-serve".
If jenkins finds an extension of the SimplePageDecorator it will use the Jelly files provided by that plugin.
Otherwise Jenkins will fall back to the default implementation.
@Extension
public class MySimplePageDecorator extends SimplePageDecorator {
public String getProductName() {
return "MyJenkins";
}
}
The above will take override over the default because the default implementation has a very low ordinal ( @Extension(ordinal=-9999))
If you have competing plugins implementing SimplePageDecorator, the implementation with the highest ordinal will be used.
As a simple example, to customize the logo we display in the login page, create a simple-head.jelly with the following content:
To customize the login page further, create a simple-header.jelly like this:
Welcome to ${it.productName}!
For example, I used this technique to create a prototype of a login page for a CloudBees product I am working on:
Conclusion
We hope you like the recent changes to some core pages and as well the new design and UX. We further hope you feel enabled to
customize the look and feel to adopt your needs with the SimplePageDecorator.
