Add ability to save montage settings and default page

[kevinruffus]

So far the one thing that I've found that makes Zoneminder less end user friendly is the interface. After initial configuration, the primary usage would likely be the montage view (for end users, such as office admins).

As such, it's important to be able to set this as the user default page (which I see should be possible, though I haven't found documentation on the syntax/use of the option in the online documentation), and to configure and save the FULL configuration of the montage page. The current Edit Layout option only seems to save the Layout option, not the Width, Height, or Scale options. This results in a jumbled mess of camera views more often than not, which is obviously less than ideal.

[iconnor]

Options->User-admin->Home View

Not sure why I didn't implement setting everything in the url... oh well, next version.

[kevinruffus]

I figured out, through trial and error, that I had to paste the last part of the url into the Home View box. So if the primary url is zm.example.com/zm, I needed to put ?view=montage into the box, as that's the remainder. That's what I couldn't find in the documentation, what the proper syntax was. Meaning did I just put the name of the page, the full link, etc.

Could be useful to add a tooltip next to it like other options have, and a quick blurb in the docs wouldn't hurt.

I'd try to help with it, but my coding experience is limited to c++ from when I was in college and some extensive bash scripting.

From what amateur mucking around in html and PHP I've done in the past, though, a simple copy, paste into the correct location of the code, and quick edit of the text could do the trick.

[burger]

So far the one thing that I've found that makes Zoneminder less end user friendly is the interface. After initial configuration, the primary usage would likely be the montage view (for end users, such as office admins).

Yes, I reviewed a dahua system recently and its pretty much montage view, recent event list (from zmninja) and history search. There is no doubt that user accessibility is a high priority if you want software to gain consumer appeal. At least with ZM we can build whatever front end we desire. ZMNinja does a good job, so I'd deploy that to customers instead of the web interface.

[kevinruffus]

So far the one thing that I've found that makes Zoneminder less end user friendly is the interface. After initial configuration, the primary usage would likely be the montage view (for end users, such as office admins).

Yes, I reviewed a dahua system recently and its pretty much montage view, recent event list (from zmninja) and history search. There is no doubt that user accessibility is a high priority if you want software to gain consumer appeal. At least with ZM we can build whatever front end we desire. ZMNinja does a good job, so I'd deploy that to customers instead of the web interface.

Unfortunately ZMNinja is EOL, or is about to be, unless I'm mistaken. The person maintaining it made a post about it.

[kevinruffus]

The user interface for most users honestly doesn't need to be complex, just simple to navigate and use.

If I knew how to help make it happen, I would propose separating most of the current frontend as an admin panel, and put the montage and other necessary pages into a standard user frontend that's simplified and probably prettied up a bit.

The vast majority of the time that's all that would actually be used.

Sadly I don't really know jack about how to help with that, and it's probably a lot of work.

That's actually a common issue I see mentioned directly or alluded to indirectly, regarding most NVR software. Vendor specific NVRs with proprietary software typically have that simplistic interface as the primary interface. NVR software that can run on any PC tends to default to the full admin side, making it a bit overwhelming for most users. As a whole, I think they'd be better off splitting the viewing and pulling recordings parts of the interface off into its own frontend page, with advanced admin functions kept separate.