I use Cockpit CMS to make content editing easier for my clients. Recently I noticed a lot of them getting confused with how Cockpit works. To a non-developer, singletons and collects seem very confusing. I’ve also had clients create their own singletons and collections thinking that’s how to use the CMS.
Could we get the option to let people theme Cockpit easier, or for the default UI to be a little easier to understand for non-techy people.
Hi
can you give more examples on how to improve the usibility?
Thanks!
I mean an option is to swich Cockpit from ‘Development’ mode to ‘Production’ mode. Production mode could stop users accessing the ability to create Singletons and Collections etc and generally simplify the UI (if no singletons then don’t show the panel for it)
Lots of my clients find the UI over complicated as commonly I’ll only have a singleton for the general site settings and a collection or two for blog posts / projects.
If you want I could create a mockup of something that might feel a little easier to use (in both dev and production mode)
ok, but why don’t you just use different user groups? e.g. add an additional group author and assign rights as needed 
It’s not that I don’t want users having these permissions. In general the UI has confused a lot of my clients. Directus has a really nice clean UI and it’s clear to the user where they need to go but Cockpits backend is really well made and I love the flow of creating and managing singletons/collections.
I would add that publishers/content creators have gotten used to the Wordpress paradigm that you now see in many UIs for CMSs - left column navigation, right column editing/content creation. I do think this approach is cleaner overall and matches user expectations.
It depends on the users. In my experience, users want to find their contents with one click and they are afraid, if they accidentally click into some settings. So I give them two accounts. One with admin rights and one with author rights. Authors have a clean ui and they aren’t allowed to create new collections etc. So they have the ability to explore everything, but they should never login as admin, if they don’t have to.
You can use the constant COCKPIT_ENV_ROOT to switch between custom dev and production setups.
Theming
I wrote the addon DashboardGrid. You can move unwanted widgets to the trash area to hide them and you can create your own widgets to give your users a cleaner starting point.
My addon rljUtils has a DarkMode theme. It needs some fine tuning with contrasts and it uses dirty !important css to overwrite defaults, but it could be a base for creating a simple new theme.
If you want to change the logo, have a look at my WhiteLabel addon.