 Welcome. This is the April community chat. We're talking about C-panel themes, specifically paper lantern and Jupiter, and also kind of dreaming up sort of future of hosting tools and platforms, maybe even sort of what we, what you all like to see, what I'd like to see, things like that. So I think the big one to kind of kick off here is there is a transition sort of happening in C-panel land. It's been happening for a little while actually. And that is the theme that we've been using at Reclaim across everything that uses C-panel, our shared hosting to major one's own, is the paper lantern theme. It's the one you're probably familiar with. And a while ago, and I'm top of my head, I'm trying to remember exactly when they laid this out. It would be about a year and a half ago, they laid out the Jupiter theme, which is sort of the next big supported theme from the C-panel folks. And there are some differences. There's some things that's supposed to do better. There's some things that I'm not a big fan of about it. But I would say all in all, it's similar. The tools are in the same places, they're called the same things. But some things look a little bit different. But I kind of wanted to talk about sort of what those differences are and actually lay them out other than to say they are different, but we can kind of dig into it a little bit more. And I also think it's kind of interesting to see over the rollout of Jupiter how what's changed because Jupiter itself is available. You can use it right now. You can switch to it if you want to. And I'll kind of show that. But some of the things that they talked about that the C-panel talked about when they originally announced it are not there yet in Jupiter. And the things that I'm interested in seeing what they look like when they do appear and what they may allow us to do at Reclaim and what allow admins, the domain of the zone to do. And some of them are, they're just not here yet and they've announced that they're going to be rolling that out later. So it's kind of interesting to look at that. I'm going to share my screen real quick just to kind of show this initial blog post from C-panel on, hey, like we've got a new theme. It's called Jupiter. This is July of 2021 is when they put this out. And they talk about, hey, the tools page. This is the same thing as, this is effectively C-panel as far as I'm concerned. This is the page with all the stuff on it. You can see here in this theme that they actually, initial version of it did not have icons at least in this screenshot. And that's actually different now. There are icons there now, which thank God. Honestly, I thought this without any icons was not great personally. They also talk about the solutions page, which this is not currently here in the version of Jupiter that we're seeing right now. But the idea of this is this is an effort to sort of embed documentation and support materials right into C-panel, which I think is a great idea on the face of it. And something that I'm kind of interested to see. Now I'll say they have pushed this off. It's not in there right now. And I personally think the how this is done matters a lot. And right now we can't know what it's going to look like because they don't have a lot of information out there about it. But this idea I think is an interesting one to me. And the other thing that they're talking about going forward at this point was having guided solutions. So this would be a sort of walkthrough style documentation and things that you could add to C-panel. And again, this is one that is really interesting to me. I think because the idea of when you first sign up for an account, a hosting account, and you get dumped into C-panel, it's like, now what? That's tricky. I mean, we've, at Reclaim, we have the applications thing at the top of the C-panel to, hey, I want WordPress. You can click on it. And that's at least something to get you started. But I love the idea of an official solution from C-panel that would have the capacity to help folks kind of explore and figure out how to do maybe more complicated things. Maybe you could have a guided solution on how do I register, if you're a domain of one's own administrator, you could have a guided solution that's, how do I register a top level domain? What does that even mean? Oh, well, you could go to a registrar and then you would do this. Having that right in C-panel could be kind of cool, I think. And then they also talk about customization. So having help section and adding common questions to it, resource links, link, like I mentioned before, link your own documentation videos, change the color palette, upload custom logos. Some of this is stuff that is, I mean, changing the color palettes. But I, again, you know, linking your own stuff, I think that would be really cool to see. It's not here yet. It's just something that they've mentioned that they want to do. So I'm really excited to see that potential. But, you know, some of that we're still waiting on. Again, this is a blog post from almost two years ago. So looking at C-panel's Jupiter page now, and this is just sort of like their, you know, product page, I guess, for it and talking about what's here. Some of this stuff is elaborated on. Some of it, they focus on different things in here, too, of the strengths. So you can see a more updated screenshot. I always find it interesting that in their screenshots, they put email as the first block, which in my experience is not what people are using C-panel for. I mean, you may use that, but it's not the first thing you're using C-panel for. So I think that's kind of interesting. But, you know, they focus on sort of mobile compatibility, which is good to see. And they talk about, hey, there's a modern looking feel, improved navigation, one-click WordPress install is an accessibility. So this is sort of stuff that I wanted to kind of demo a little bit and talk through. So the first of all, we'll talk about one-click WordPress installs. We already have that and reclaim hosting because of installatron. So this is sort of not a factor. If you're curious, installatron is something separate from C-panel. It integrates. So it's something we have. But, you know, if you were to go to a different company, hosting company that may use C-panel, they might not have installatron. So having that part of C-panel is interesting, but kind of doesn't really affect our situation so much. But these are the three I would say do. The modernized looking feel. So looking at this here, this is my own C-panel for shared hosting. And again, I mentioned you can flip back and forth. So if you're curious looking at this yourself, you know, you can just go to C-panel on wherever, you know, account. And probably you're on paper lantern right now. So if you go to the sidebar here under theme, you can just switch this over to Jupyter and see what it looks like. There, you know, ultimately it's very similar. You've got the same basic categories. You've got the same tool names. I think the icons are, I don't like them very much. I think they're less colorful and fun. But they are there. So that's good to see. Our applications box category that we add is available and works the same as it ever has. So that's an option. That's something that we had to work to integrate into this new theme. But from the most part, this is very, very similar other than it's a different color scheme and look. You'll notice this is one thing I don't love is that this sidebar where tools and then they are talking about solutions will go here. Because there's no solutions, there's just one thing that says tools. And that's all that's in the sidebar. It's kind of a weird sidebar that does make it a little easier, I would say, when you're telling folks how to do things in cPanel. If you've ever been in the situation of saying, all right, go to say add on domains. And then you have to tell them, okay, go back to that main page. The only option, the best option, I think was to tell people to click on the little, I call it the waffle menu that's in the top right. It was a very small button in paper lantern. And this is what it looked like. So you have them click on this. And that's okay. But I do like that there's an actual text label on it now. So you can just tell people click on tools and that will get them back to the tools page. And it's even labeled with a header of tools. So I do think that is an improvement. And that kind of gets into the other thing mentioned here of improved navigation and accessibility. So I'm definitely not an expert at like evaluating the accessibility of web pages. But I will say I did some basic looking at like the structure from like headings and sort of the makeup of cPanel. And I do I can see the work that they're talking about in terms of improved accessibility. There's actually more logical structure. This is a this is the header one and then each of these are header twos I believe under them. And that wasn't really exactly the same structure in paper lantern. So that's really great for folks who are using things like screen readers and other tools to aid in the use of the page. I also say I did test this out in a screen reader. I was just using voice over on the Mac. It's just the built in one. And paper lantern has a lot of issues in voice over at least where text labels get repeated every time. So if you're if you're having it read out to you what the applications box says it'll say WordPress icon WordPress WordPress Omega icon Omega Omega that seems to be resolved in Jupiter. So as far as I can see those are the major things but I'm sure there's a lot of other changes that I'm just as a somewhat of a layman here can't speak to but it is encouraging to see that both the mobile support the tools menu being labeled and the screen reader improvements at least to me all seem like genuine advancements if small ones in certain some of them are kind of small ones but it is kind of interesting to see. So but other than that you know it's a it's a look and feel refresh basically. So that's kind of a quick breakdown of just like this is the things that I tailor and noticing are meaningfully different or meaningful improvements. It's also worth pointing out that there's some things to note about like where are we at in this process of moving between these things. So we are currently as a company using C panel one out version 102 which is a long term support version that is the last version that lets us use both paper lantern and Jupiter and that gives us a lot of time here to make the change over to Jupiter as we as a company are updating our documentation. So we are actually pretty far along in updating our own documentation at support.reclaimhosting.com and then next from that will be updating the the the domain of one's own documentation that some schools utilize that's if you're unfamiliar that's you can see a sample of it at stateu.org slash docs and that is our next task to sort of tailor immuted oops that is our next next task to sort of update I just oh pilot threw it in there too. So if you're unfamiliar that's what I'm talking about with our community documentation that would be the next thing we're working on updating and that's where we're at it's again important to note that really where we're updating is screenshots the actual text and how the tools work that stuff's the same so it's not a radical change in some ways but but that's something we're working on. So and I guess the the final thing about the documentation too so if you have your own set of documentation that you maintain is maybe something you want to keep in mind we'll probably put an update out there when we have the domain of one's own documentation updated we can let admins know like hey this is updated if you want to grab our screenshots you know feel free to reuse them or we do have the capability of actually replacing your documentation suite with this one with our updated one so if you want to just start over from what we have you can do that too you just would let us know in a ticket and we would get that updated for you that the tricky thing because there it is itself a WordPress site with its own content we don't have a way to like if you have your own customized documentation we don't have a way to just replace your images for you that that will be a manual process and if folks have questions about the documentation stuff there's a lot of things we could talk about in terms of documentation and sort of the future of that but I'm also sensitive to that we're 20 minutes in almost and I haven't given anyone an opportunity to speak except for me and Amanda when I was muted I guess so I just wanted to say like what what kind of get the temperature of folks in the call like what what are do people have questions about the theme and functionality stuff or maybe documentation like what are where people at right now or pilot and Amanda like anything I'm missing talking about what Jupiter offers I think you covered it from my perspective I'm trying to think I'll admit that I don't have the most experience with paper lantern or with Jupiter because my experience is all in paper lantern and also I don't do that much of my own work in cPanel I do a lot of troubleshooting in cPanel but as a user I have my blog my site set up and I tend to go directly to that yeah I um I would I would say I actually do interact with it quite a bit from my own shared hosting just because I do a lot of stuff in the file manager just I have a lot of weird little files in there um but I've been moving back and forth and it's been fine you know as Shannon mentioned in the chat like it is a lot friendlier than last time we were looking at it so I I would say it's been an improvement there um you got your hand raised yes so this might be already addressed and um the documentation of state udocs but I noticed with the switch into Jupiter the ability to create additional domains is going to be dedicated create additional domains in terms of uh different accounts or subdomains yeah um that you'll still be able to do that I think I think what's deprecated so um and again I could be wrong in this but there's kind of a there's sort of two ways to make add-on domains and subdomains right now in cPanel and that is there are subdomains there's that button called subdomains and the button called add-on domains and then there is a new tool called just domains and that domains tool tries to kind of do everything all in one you can make subdomains there you can do add-on domains um and that is their new tool and I think that's where they're putting development going forward they haven't announced that they're going to pull the other tools yet and um this is kind of a similar situation to Jupiter in some ways in my opinion the add-on domains and subdomains panels are easier to use um I think than the combined one but I can see from their perspective like it's kind of weird because people don't know like what is an add-on domain that's actually a cPanel concept it's not really a universal concept so I could see that from that perspective too but I um so that first of all that is not inherent to Jupiter right now you do still have all of the the three things that you do still have the add-on and subdomain tools as well as that domains tool that's that's been there for a few versions it's been at least as long as I've been working at Reclaim I think significantly before that actually but I can't tell you when it was introduced but um and they haven't announced like we're pulling the old ones yet but um that would be another change and that would be another documentation you know change potentially although a smaller one because it would just be you know if you have documentation on how to make a subdomain that would be at that point but it's we're at a point right now where at least from our perspective at Reclaim we still would recommend people use the subdomain tool for making a new subdomain because it's it's a little simpler to wrap your head around right that's a good question yeah and when you click on the subdomain you get an information box in blue I can share my screen too if you want a look this says subdomain management is now available in the domains interface we have deprecated the subdomains interface and we'll remove it in the future release yeah yep so totally they haven't announced when though from a faculty or staff perspective or even the students who have c-panels because there is no date associated with a future release so just having that available within the domains of how to create a subdomain or add-on domain in future releases where subdomains is no longer going to be available in c-panel yeah I think that's something we can definitely put on the list of um you know well certainly something we'll have to document of how does that work I think the the I'd be hesitant at this stage for us to have like competing documentation of these are the two ways because I I feel personally I feel like it's complicated enough I think when folks when you're writing documentation it's good to tell folks this is the way we recommend there may be other ways to do it but this is the way we recommend um but you know that's not to say we couldn't have something ready maybe even share it with the community and say this is what we would say but we're not gonna put it out there until it makes sense to go that direction but that's just my opinion right like so there's nothing to say that if you're making your own you couldn't say we at Carleton recommend you use the domains panel and here's how you do it and I'll say from it's not that complicated to make a subdomain in there or anything it's just basically what happens when you go to the domains panel you get a text box to type in whatever you want so my main domain name is jaden.me if I put in um subdomain.jaden.me it will know what you want to do and react accordingly um and then from there you have to uncheck a box that says share document root if you don't uh it basically tries to to to assume what you want actually I can show this really quick to um here's what it looks like so um if I so I'm in that um thing and I mean Shannon mentioned you're not seeing that I think that may be a version thing we should have most people on the same um version of cpanel but I can double check that but anyway if I go to subdomains here um it this is what em you're talking about right this this blue box so if you do click on this or just go back and you find yourself just clicking right on domains um this is what it looks like so this is every like web directory on my account I have a lot of accounts linked in here or sorry a lot of domains linked in here so ignore that but I can click create a new domain and let's say I registered uh or I wanted to register a new subdomain let's call it subdomain.jaden.me once you do that it's going to go oh jaden.me already exists he wants to make a subdomain and it's going to assume what I want here it'll say great and you'll actually notice here that it unchecked um it actually unchecked the uh share document root box automatically kind of figuring out what I wanted and so I would just hit submit here and it would make it so and the reason I say that I think it's more complicated is not that I think typing in a single subdomain name is complicated but I personally feel like when folks are creating a subdomain a button that says subdomain is more discoverable right to find out what you do um and I so but that again is for sure up to interpretation um so I uh I wouldn't say that I'm um you know that's just my thought on it um but um yeah I I don't think it's particularly complicated but yeah it will have to be documented in the future um and um something on our list for sure but we we don't have any word from cpanel at least is when that would be removed and when it does it's important to keep in mind that it's not a hard date what it is is it's this version will remove it and then it's up to us at reclaim to decide when we're going to roll that version out for folks we don't talk a lot about cpanel version updates because most of the time we don't like end users don't really care right like it's sort of more about security and bug fixes and things um but this theme stuff and something like the domains panel like you brought up and those are times where they would care right so but thanks I kind of forgot to cover that that's a good point it's definitely related to jupiter too but um the same thing would happen with paper lantern for there is both options in paper lantern as well tim asked in the chat tailor uh if we wanted to future proof our local documentation so the documentation that's specifically on a domain of one's own instance uh can we remove the add-on domains and the subdomains icon from cpanel in anticipation and I think that would be as simple as modifying the package that a user gets to say no you don't get these tools anymore yeah those those I think you're right pilot you could remove them there if you wanted to I will say um that may be a good move we've seen cpanel walk proposed changes back before so it's possible that they wouldn't I think um I think it would be a safe change to make to be clear but I'm just saying you aren't guaranteed 100 percent that this will happen because this is the same thing jupiter was announced and it was supposed to be the old theme was supposed to be deprecated much earlier than it has um but because of uh pretty much every company that uses cpanel reaching out and saying this does not work for us in these ways they made a bunch of changes to the theme including adding icons adding continuing support for the older theme longer than expected that solutions page thing I think was a result the reason that's not there right now is because of proposed feedback so there's a possibility that they would walk back that announcement although I think maybe it's unlikely in the case of the domains button from my perspective documentation is always tricky because things are constantly changing I made an article last year I can find the exact date too it was February 2022 I made an article saying that this new theme was available and I attached screenshots and saying these are the main differences at that time there was no applications panel at the top and you had to install wordpress omega and whatever applications via the software section and click on the install it install itron applications installer since then things have changed icons are added the my applications have been added the organization has changed so I need to go back and update that documentation granted I haven't touched it in a year so maybe that's my on me and I need who mentioned it in the chat Shannon that they're they have a student documentation lead to constantly look at things and update them yeah I mean what you just outlined is the thing with documentation right like documentation is so important and it could be really helpful but you know documenting things is not in a one-time it's an ongoing task and the more documentation you have the larger the ongoing task is that's usually a worthwhile trade-off but it's so tricky because you can't ever be sure you can't ever be sure when's the best time to document something and personally I'm always kind of trying to figure out the balance that that there's ever a correct answer but the best balance for what am I linking to versus what am I creating whole cloth right so I don't know that we necessarily always made the best change that I always made the best decisions on that when I was a domains admin but I tried to link to reclaim stuff or even other c-panel stuff when possible but yeah it's it's a balance for sure Tim yeah I also think that there's a relationship between your sort of training strategies or your in-class visit strategies in your documentation and so if you have those students for four years going in now and sort of retraining them on how to create a subdomain makes some sense because I know these other changes likely might happen at some point over the course of their time here at the college and that seems to me to sort of tip the scale as to whether or not I need to invest in changing a whole bunch of documentation and things like that I think that the thing that I put first is what am I going to say when I go into a class or what am I going to say when a student schedules a drop-in with me to go over how to do this and and I would like to start every sort of academic year at least with a consistent sort of training approach and if it looks like the subdomains icon even if they're gonna slow walk it if there is some possibility in the future of it going away I think I'd rather just train everybody to use the other use the other tool especially since it's not really any more challenging it might even eliminate some of the questions that we've had in the past about you know how do I do this or or whatever yeah you know there's definitely um and I like like what you're talking about with focusing on the training part of it how am I is kind of how I think we at Reclaim like to prioritize documentation to like what are we getting what are people asking about you know what questions are people coming to us with and what could be you know the most beneficial for them and us to document first and I think that's usually a good perspective of like hey you know if you're working with your students and saying like you know hey what what questions have been coming up more than one time or have come up recently at all I guess in recent you know drop in appointments or whatever and focusing on those two when you're talking about building out and updating that to me is the best way to start but it it's again there's a lot of strategies there Jim yeah I just add the view the the challenge I find in a lot of the documentation is it's very easy for us to and too often I think we end up focusing on the documentation for the use of the tool and how do we and so we're talking about how do we proof future proof the documentation to future changes in the tool but I think what often happens is we need to we need to think in terms of how do you prove the future proof the user and one of the challenges is documentation the focus is too much on the tool is training and students or your faculty or whoever does it learns oh when I want this I go do a b c d they don't learn it's very easy to set up documentation that they don't learn what they're doing with a b c d yeah and and for other folks then the lack of that knowledge of what's happening ends up being a giant barrier for me personally the sooner we can get rid of subdomains and add on domain tools out of there the better because I would much rather have a separate whether ideally in documentation but there needs to be a piece of documentation of explaining to people what the heck is a subdomain and then out on to me I mean I don't use those too often enough for me to be clear and so it's just a giant you know that's why oh I know I'm going to do some with the domains I like the new domains because it's you know it's I know I'm doing some with domains and I type in what I want to see uh now the tool could be improved by adding a response after you type it in there saying oh you know not just automatically checking off the structure the related say it's a subdomain but if they actually added a message that said oh you're creating a subdomain yeah um that would help reinforce stuff so that's that's my view on this stuff I've been using jupiter for a while now admittedly I don't really we don't really touch you know yeah again it's 98% go in and go to my apps and you know occasionally I'll do the encryption stuff and things like that but I kind of like I like I like it frankly so what I'd like to see on their when they do the solutions thing is solutions it sounds like solutions tied to how do you use the tool a lot and that's fine but if they can have a way that it it's easy for us as the admin or the dev ops to say you know to add in I don't know links in those solutions to things we create that are at a higher level background you know the more fundamental knowledge if that makes any sense yeah I would I would totally agree with that I would love to see perfectly honest with you an ideal starting point for a solutions page a wouldn't have the name solutions I hate that name personally but let's call it help getting started I don't know right I would love as an admin to have some kind of control that was like this page getting started help call it whatever you want solutions fine the first time they get in the c-panel or maybe every time maybe it could start there and just give me a whizzy wig editor for the page and all I would do there is link to some support articles I've written elsewhere and say like you have an account now and I'd probably link to things like how do I install a blog oh that'd be awesome you know that would be awesome that I think would be great and then say like yeah you know what you're going to click on the tools page and then you know there are a lot of tools that can do this but a lot of people like to use WordPress for this that's always been my main thing with this stuff and why I think that you know that first contact with c-panel is it's always good when you can have someone there with you or have a video to reference at least or or maybe a you know specific instructions I guess because if you're a student and you're asked to sign up for an account because you're going to be blogging alongside other students for a course or something just getting a c-panel account is like okay right you need more information than that right then so I would love to see a place for some of those things to be right in front of the user or at least be easy to find maybe in c-panel and I'm hoping some at some point that solutions page can be that um the uh all right I'm just kind of catching up with the chat stuff here you're muted Taylor I keep hitting I don't know spacebar or something and muting um I'm just kind of catching up with the chat but um Shannon mentioning the idea of AI chat bots and integration with knowledge bases that'd be interesting that's not something I know a lot about right now but I will say that the you know the last round of chat bots from like five six years ago um were not very sophisticated and it would be interesting to see what like the current crop of large language models could do in terms of being fed c-panel documentation and helping people although I'd be a little bit worried about some implications there in terms of it being wrong but um that'd be interesting and having that be available to folks um you know a friendly way would be kind of cool this is a dreaming stage Taylor I guess yeah AI tools that are actually helpful and not reinventing the wheel um um if if we have AI tools that can pull stuff straight from reclaim or existing tools from c-panel um but I I prefer short snippet of little articles and videos saying I want to create a subdomain then here's how to do three steps in the domains interface or if it's I do see some implications in in the sense that different institutions they have different instructional material sure and I've seen that with just basic lms integrations like Moodle Moodle is just a giant repository of plugins in at Carleton and um there are some blocks that other institutions have that we don't have and we have faculty who do just basic google searches and say hey I want to bulk move all of my activities from one section to another but we don't have that yeah and I think you know um that'll definitely be the case here there's definitely schools that have different sets of functionality turned on um or even just like admins that have different comfortable you know like when I was at s and c I didn't I helped people a lot with subdomains but not so much add-on domains so not that I couldn't right like I would and I would ask reclaim if I didn't know something but like there's also not just like what's capable but sort of what is the person at your institution going to suggest because this is the best this is what people are doing at you know this school or whatever um there's some value for that right so that you when you have a follow-up question they actually know what to help you with um but I will say at least from my perspective too I think one thing that cPanel doesn't do a great job of but like could it's like almost there is I would love to see things that let users come to terms with what the capability of this toolbox they've been given is that's kind of always my interest in domain of one's own stuff is like hey we've given you this ultra flexible tool for web hosting and you won't necessarily know what's even possible uh and there's a bunch of buttons here and maybe if you're really curious you could click on them and read the descriptions and maybe that would help you find some things out but I would love cPanel to be a better launching point for like okay so you have in like contextual too so you have the domain name taylor.stateu.org just so you know that means you could also have wordpress.taylor.stateu.org or it means you could have an email account there if your school allows it like some of those things I would like to see cPanel build in more contextually of like this is your capability based on the features that are enabled and based on this and have those suggestions I guess be somehow integrated maybe that's a solutions thing maybe it's just more dynamic information in tools like the domains tool I don't know. Tom has a question in the chat taylor. Has anyone you know done any significant customization or creation of cPanel themes? I personally don't know anyone who's like created a cPanel theme um the the from my understanding and I could be I'm making a couple assumptions here but um the cPanel themes are mostly made by the company themselves not that you couldn't make your own but the support there comes from the company so it would be probably easier to customize than to create from whole clock that being said the customization at least in the past has been pretty limited and it does seem like in jupiter they're making some efforts to improve that so I mentioned already like the color stuff and that's that's that's cool but like I will say the things we've done to make that application panel were kind of they weren't really specifically hacks but they were on that level with paper lantern and some of that stuff to like reorder things to make sure like our applications panel is at the top some of that is actually official and easier to do in paper in jupiter than it was in paper lantern so it'd be interesting to see um if that keeps improving I know one thing that I've seen mentioned that I've specifically had admins ask about in paper lantern which was can we have a panel like say the email panel available to to users but collapsed so that by default because you can collapse them yourself and it will remember that but you can't like set a default collapse setting and that does look like something they're going to be adding to jupiter um I've seen in the documentation that specifically referenced I don't think it's there right now but that's a small thing but could be kind of interesting to say yeah you know here's some more tools you probably don't need to go poking in here but like if you want to we didn't take them from you um could be kind of interesting they seem to be coming in now okay I'd really like to see um Taylor we've talked about this a little bit I don't believe it's anywhere in their actual plans for development but that big blue bar that you pointed out on the left hand side um in my ideal world you can click and drag tools from cPanel into there to create like a hot menu um so that you can get the things that you need all the time without having to scroll and look for them but yeah having some like user customization or maybe even admin like defaults too some yeah something like that um and I know that you said they're going to be putting stuff there eventually theoretically but in the meantime it's a lot of open space that could be customizable and isn't so yeah I agree I think all I've seen them talk about is tools and solutions and even if both of those things right now solutions isn't there even once they add that that's still still a lot of empty space and I would love to see that I like the idea of like bookmarking tools or favoriting them or something that could be kind of cool um maybe even be interesting to see if like there was some capability to put again like contextual information there or I don't know yeah yeah so Tom linked to the spot where they talk about the collapsing feature I think the question for me and I have looked at this exact page I haven't personally messed with this on like one of our development servers that we have but um but the question for this and that cPanel doesn't always document well is they'll make this change update the documentation and then not necessarily mention what version this is available in so I don't know if in one or two this works yet which is the version we're using but it might be it might it might be um so that's something I'm kind of excited about it's a small feature that default collapsing thing but I think it could be interesting so um I have a couple things to kind of keep keep the keep the dreaming going although we're getting 50 minutes in already I guess um but I've kind of wanted to see I like to take notes on these and see what people bring up um but what if folks feel like cPanel so so one of the thing again I brought this up but this is not a new idea this is a sense really domain of one's own as a concept but like that cPanel can be a toolbox to let people you know play in this space play in the web find out the capabilities and do things with those capabilities what do what do people feel like cPanel does well like does it do that is it living up to that I mean I know technically those things are capable but like do you feel like do you feel like students or faculty or really anybody who's encountering cPanel are they discovering some of these things on their own or do they have to be told does it do any of those discoverable things well and you can feel free to mention that in the chat or you know speak up what does it help people discover the first thing that comes to mind for me and I know that this isn't cPanel specific because phpmyadmin is independent of cPanel but as a teaching tool I think phpmyadmin is really helpful in bridging from a person's sort of introduction using WordPress to an understanding of how relational databases work helping them to recognize that WordPress's architecture relies on a relational database and I think that having it available the way it is in cPanel for folks to have already installed some applications and then see how those directories are sort of laid out also gives them a little bit of an insight into sort of model view controller kind of architecture so I mean I'm talking to students who are really delving in at this point and asking in-depth questions but I think that that part of it and the file manager because honestly today with Chromebooks and things like that folks don't have a real deep understanding of what a file system looks like or how those kinds of things are organized so both of those I think are pretty effective for teaching yeah I love that and I would totally agree I I've seen even like compsci professors use cPanel file manager to kind of help folks come to grip with directories and things like that and it's so great to be able to just pop that open and see this is the stuff and you can mess it up from here if you want to you know and and yeah I love that both those examples I'd say it's the usefulness for me of cPanel and the related tools that are in cPanel the folks I deal with are at the opposite end of what Tim just talked about they're not diving in deep and stuff like that as a matter of fact a lot of them I you know get introduced to the cPanel and they never really need to do much of anything with it and if they do they call me and I step them through it but at least they've seen familiarized with cPanel the big but that experience alone just getting into it and seeing some of the tools is it's educational because without that I mean alternatively it could be Plesk or you know one of the similar ones but I mean the the corresponding transition here is this is at least Windows the first version of Windows or you know back in the late 80s where you could interact with your computer point and click you know GUI interface and not have to go with entire command line interface and so as a result I mean when folks experience that and I you know I just explain look this is how you control a server you know without how I mean it's the Windows controls your local machine you know that's how you control the server and you start seeing the light bulb go on and they begin to realize that oh all that stuff in the cloud all that out there is just another computer you know and it has it works the same way and it has all the same stuff and like you say you know file structures and things like that and that's that's very useful that is I like that metaphor too right maybe of positioning cPanel is the operating system of your web hosting even if it's like okay well technically it's Linux like if you if they want to know but like but to think of it to conceptualize it in that way and think of like you use Windows and is Windows your computer no but it's how you interact with it maybe you know right and it's actually for those of us old enough it's actually like the very first Windows which was in fact yeah just a GUI shell over DOS sure yeah and that and I do think the cool thing about that metaphor and I've used that one before with folks similar in a similar way um is for folks that want to keep diving that metaphor keeps working on a deep level too right like has everything you can do in cPanel you could do from the terminal like literally well I shouldn't say literally I'm sure there's some exceptions but even as a user like with no admin privileges pretty much everything has a terminal equivalent and if you want to know that and explore that this is a place where you could now so that that it's kind of cool that that keeps working at the front end and the deeper level I would say um I think um Shannon one thing that you mentioned DNS and I would agree I think it's a good place to I mean it gives you the tools to explore DNS but yeah DNS is complicated and one thing I would love to see with cPanel is so like if if you all haven't encountered this with DNS before but the idea that one of the things that's tricky is about DNS is you can't always see changes you make immediately right so you make a change and then things have to roll out and propagate and depending on when you've last visited a URL it may take much longer like hours for you versus if you talk to a friend who's maybe off campus so they're talking to a different DNS server they may see it instantly and one of the things that we like to point people to at Reclaim is this tool called what'smydns.com and it's just a website that lets you see on many different DNS servers what is the current state of things I even be so cool to see cPanel have some kind of like API integration with a tool like that to tell you you made this change but just so you know most the world isn't seeing that yet that would be a game changer to have a little status indicator or some information there I would love to see something it's an idea I've had like as long as I've been doing stuff with DNS and seems obvious to me maybe it's not an easy thing to pull off I don't I don't know it probably wouldn't be and I but I think that would be so that would go such a long way to helping people learn this stuff to know you didn't necessarily make a mistake you just may have to wait a little bit or maybe even do even more complicated things and use things like skip DNS to let you preview DNS changes if you could do that in cPanel man that would be awesome but not right now but that that's my dream because I think DNS at least when you interact with it as much as we do at reclaim like I'm I'm certainly more comfortable with it than I was but I'm still not always confident I still sometimes have to test or ask other folks who may know more than me so being able to preview those things in the tool in cPanel would be so big I think knowing HTTP status codes is way more helpful knowing a ton about DNS yeah HTTP status codes could be interesting to have more information about what those mean right contextually and maybe some of that I could pin on Apache right because it's often putting those in front of you and maybe apaches error pages could have more information there yeah yeah this this came up again we're talking about students who've shown a real interest in what's going on but it came up when they noticed that you could customize a 404 error page on a website and they knew what that one code meant but they didn't realize that there were there was a whole sort of level of information contained in in HTTP status codes and how those work and anyway yeah I don't know that total digression I apologize not a digression at all I think that's good um yeah I I think um again it just kind of gets back to that thing that I I think cPanel can offer but it would be great to see keeping working on is like the making things easy for folks when possible but allowing exploration into the the deeper possibilities as well you know being both is what I want and is tricky from a design perspective maybe but what I'd like to see them keep exploring um well I think we're we're just out about out of time so I'm gonna actually stop the recording here um so bye to everyone who's watching recording