Personal impressions about JEM 5.0.1 and +

Dear Friends,
I am really impressed about all these new possibilities. Thank you for your big big work.
On the other side as Frontend User with rights to create events and venues, it will be more and more difficult to choose, what's important.
Please think on this too. I think about little communities, firemen, sportgroups: They need not much more than WHAT, WHEN, WHERE! 
I hope, that they find their way through so many exciting possibilities!
Jojo
I work on a site which want to be a collection of special prayers in Switzerland. No publicity, only information. I really hope, the contributors (in FE) can find a way through this labyrinth.

Thank you, Jojo. This is a very important point, and your perspective is especially valuable because you know JEM both as a frontend user and through your support and testing work.

You are right: adding new capabilities should not turn the basic contribution workflow into a labyrinth.

In JEM 5.1.0, I'm introducing JEM usage profiles. A normal upgrade from JEM 5.0.1 starts with Essential (JEM Basic). Its purpose is to preserve the familiar and straightforward JEM workflow: WHAT, WHEN and WHERE, together with the traditional optional information. The new Advanced Events & Venues sections are only available when the site explicitly selects the Advanced profile.

However, your example highlights something we should validate carefully: a site may need Advanced features while some frontend contributors still need a very simple form. We have to review this.

Do you think the Essential profile is enough to address this, or should we also consider a separate simplified frontend submission mode, independent of the site profile?

We would particularly appreciate your help testing the Essential workflow and identifying any fields or sections that still feel unnecessary. The practical goal should be that small communities and occasional contributors can create an event without seeing anything beyond what they really need.

Thank you for raising this before JEM 5.1.0 is finalized, and feel free to give your input.

Many of the new features are not in JEM 5.0.1, and have been implemented in 5.1.0 Advanced, but other new features can be moved to that Advanced profile as well, suggestions are welcome.

If you want, we could already put the JEM profiles in 5.0.1, activate Essential, and put the new stuff in Advanced. What do you think? Would that solve part of the complexity?

I also think that many of the added improvements are small aesthetic details — style, layout, things that make daily use easier. Sometimes people don't use certain features simply because they don't know they exist.

To make the new features known, we need documentation and use cases with examples. That's something that's still pending and takes time. We're missing a technical writer to add use cases.

I think JEM hasn't reached more users because it lacked a certain level of professionalism and competence. I believe these last 4 months have been the push JEM needed to play in a higher league.

I think over the years we've gained stability. That doesn't mean issues don't appear, but I believe JEM is now more powerful, flexible and stable than it was 4 years ago. The jump from version 2 to 4, and now to 5, has been substantial.

And for my part, I'll slow down a bit on implementing new features, because as we often say, sometimes there are other priorities first. I don't always have time, it goes in phases. In summer there's less work, but now in September everything gets more complicated and there's less time for everything.

Thank you, Marcos, for both posts. I will look and say, what could be switched. I really appreciate and admire your energy!
Jojo

Thanks Jojo and Marcos!

I also understand Jojo's concern that for users that are looking for a simple solution things might become a little overwhelming. The frontend submission is a good example.
In the past I have proposed an option where admins can switch fields off that they don't need. (apart from the basics: you always need a tilte, start date and time and end date and time) 
But for those who don't need all the other options simply switch off those fields in the backend configuration. Would that be a solution?

Thanks Ernst.

Your idea of allowing administrators to switch off fields made me think a bit further about this.Looking at what is currently happening in JEM 5.1 and at the proposals on GitHub, I wonder whether submission presets could be useful.JEM 5.1 already has the idea of Operating Profiles such as Essential and Advanced. As I understand it, those profiles decide which capabilities are available on the site.

A preset could perhaps do something slightly different: decide what a particular frontend contributor actually sees.For example, a small community could simply have:WHAT – WHEN – WHEREplus perhaps a description and image.A walking group could use the same JEM installation but have another preset with things such as distance, difficulty, meeting point, GPX route, safety information and registration.

A music or larger event organiser could again have another form with registration, capacity, pricing, images, etc.This seems especially relevant when looking at some of the current GitHub work and proposals. There are ideas for GPX routes (#2291), ticketing and check-in (#2296), pricing and capacity (#2301), the new image workflow (#2327), frontend category editing (#2328), Joomla custom fields (#2060), and several discussions about permissions and menu-specific configuration (#2278, #2279, #2339).

All of those can be useful features, but it also means that one universal frontend form can eventually become quite large.So perhaps Ernst's field switches could become reusable named presets instead of one global set of switches.A preset might eventually define things such as:

• visible / hidden
• required / optional
• default values
• locked values

and perhaps be selected on a Submit Event menu item. That would even make it possible to have several different submission forms on one site.

I also realise there is quite a version matrix to consider. JEM 4 is still in use, JEM 5 is here, JEM 5.1 is being developed, and there is Joomla 5 and Joomla 6. I don't really want to suggest which versions should receive something like this — that is better left to McKillo and the other developers.

For my own testing I mainly focus on Joomla 6.I think the short version of the idea is:Profiles control capabilities. Presets control complexity.Maybe this is worth working out further as a GitHub proposal