Inquiry Regarding CMS UI and Potential Contribution

[Avighna]

Dear CMS Team,

I hope you're doing well. I'm a student and competitive programmer who has used CMS extensively during various Olympiad-style contests, and I really appreciate the reliability and robustness the system offers.

That said, I’ve often found the user interface to be quite dated and unintuitive by modern standards. I understand that CMS prioritises functionality and correctness, especially in high-stakes settings, but I was curious: is there a specific reason the interface has remained in its current state? Is it a design philosophy, a matter of stability, or simply limited resources for UI development?

I’ve been considering proposing and potentially implementing some improvements to the CMS interface. I would be happy to open a detailed GitHub pull request or proposal if you’d be open to it. But before doing that, I wanted to check:

• Are contributions in this area currently welcome?

• Do you have any guidelines or expectations for UI/UX changes?

• Are there past discussions or blockers I should be aware of?

I completely understand if the team prefers to keep the interface minimal or if changes could introduce risk, but I’d love to understand the reasoning and see if there’s any space to contribute meaningfully.

Thank you for your time, and for maintaining such an important piece of infrastructure for the Olympiad community.

Warm regards,
Avighna Chhatrapati
[GitHub: avighnac]

[William Di Luigi]

Hi Avighna!

Thank you for your email and for your interest in contributing to CMS. I guess the reason the interface has remained in its current state is mostly, as you put it, because of limited resources.

To be clear, when you mention the CMS user interface, are you referring to the contestant-visible part of CMS or the admin-visible part, or both? In the beginning, both parts used a custom-made style and looked very similar (just the overall theme color was different: green for admin and blue for contestant). Then there was a UI revamp which introduced Bootstrap to the contest-visible part of CMS. As of today, that version of Bootstrap is obsolete (we're a couple versions behind, actually).

One relatively-low hanging fruit that I could see here would be to upgrade the Bootstrap version we're using, from 3.x to the current stable 5.x, this looked feasible last time I checked. There are some "widgets" of Bootstrap 3 that we are using which now don't exist anymore in Bootstrap 5, so that might be a bit challenging, but overall it should be doable.

It would be cool as well to revamp the admin-visible part of CMS, though that's probably less important.

Would you be interested to take this on? Did you have a different idea on how to improve the UI? It can be argued that simply upgrading the Bootstrap version wouldn't necessarily improve the UX. Other ways might be to embed the statement so users don't have to do the extra step of downloading it, or letting users code directly in the submission page (see https://cms-dev.github.io/contribute/#in-browser-code-editing) instead of having to upload the source file every time, etc. Let me know if you want to explore a "UX revamp" in that direction. If that's the case, I guess it would be important to gather insights from IOI delegations so that the UI can keep being "compatible" with the needs of their contestants.

I'm happy to chat in the Telegram discussion chat (or in private too).

William

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