cPanel, and its big brother WHM, can sometimes be frustrating. While cPanel is one of the most popular web hosting control panels, for good reason, it also suffers from some annoying choices by developers.<\/p>\n

In a cPanel update back in 2009 or so, a new feature was added to sub-divide long lists of items such as mail forwarders into multiple pages. From my observation, this change affects at least these features:<\/p>\n

\n
• Email Accounts<\/li>\n
• Forwarders<\/li>\n
• Subdomains<\/li>\n
• Addon Domains<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

  It probably affects others such as Parked Domains and Redirects, in fact any feature that displays a list of enabled items.<\/p>\n

  When opening one of those pages, for example forwarders, instead of displaying all forwarders as it did previously, now it displays only 10. There is a new control “Showing x Results per page”, where “x” is a drop down list allowing selection of 10, 25, 50, 100, 250, or 500.<\/p>\n

  The result is that if you have more than 10 items, if you want to see more than 10 items you must make\u00a0 a selection from that list every time you visit the page. Even if you change it to a higher value, say 500, and then change pages or create or edit an item, the next page display again returns to the default of 10. This is enormously frustrating when editing or managing multiple items such as forwarders or mail accounts.<\/p>\n

  Here’s what I think happened. When there are many items, such as a long list of forwarders, buttons such as “Add Forwarder” and “Add Domain Forwarder” were moved far down the page, below the list. Some clever cPanel developer decided that it would look better with a shorter list, hence it was split into to multiple pages and a user selection control added.<\/p>\n

  <\/a><\/a><\/a><\/p>\n

  There have been complaints about this. In response, one year ago a cPanel support rep. wrote this:
  \n“At the present time it is not possible for cPanel account users to change the default number of items per page without assistance from the hosting service provider; however, this feature request will ensure the feature idea is considered for possible implementation in the future.”<\/p>\n

  A later update from the cPanel support rep. said:
  \n“If a user changes the “Results per page” on a screen in the cPanel interface, for example: from 10 to 50, that setting should be remembered for the next time the cPanel user visits that page. Furthermore, this preference should now be applied to all cPanel pages where this setting is present.”<\/p>\n

  So, they added a feature that made user tasks more difficult. Now they plan to build a fix on top of that to change how the feature works.<\/p>\n

  What the developers should do is stand back and re-evaluate the entire page, not just try to add new code to modify their previous modification. If the issue is that the buttons potentially move too far down the page after a long list, then redesign the pages so, for example, the buttons for “Add Forwarder” and “Add Domain Forwarder” are at the top of the page. That solution would have been simpler, more elegant, and not necessitated the added user input and code complexity of the drop down list selection and upcoming additional code to remember the user’s selection.<\/p>\n

  If they are determined to retain this situation splitting the list into multiple pages with a user selection, then at least allow the user to override it. Or, allow the cPanel user to set an account-wide default of the number of items per page, ideally with one selection being unlimited. Even better, the default should be able to be set for all cPanel accounts via the reseller’s WHM.<\/p>\n

  This serves as a cautionary example when you are designing web pages or other user interfaces. Don’t focus on one element, adding code upon code to fix user issues. Try to see the forest and not just a tree or two, and consider how changing the overall layout might improve the user experience.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  cPanel, and its big brother WHM, can sometimes be frustrating. While cPanel is one of the most popular web hosting control panels, for good reason, it also suffers from some annoying choices by developers. In a cPanel update back in 2009 or so, a new feature was added to sub-divide long lists of items such […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":134,"featured_media":1285,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[143,74],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n