Feature: Account Plan and Owner Limit improvements

[shoulders]

What is the issue

The Account Plans suffers from an issue where if a user clicks on Save and Apply when he updates an Account Plan, it will wipe out any custom overrides he has applied to his accounts under this plan. Some people have got use to changing the permissions and options on a virtual server rather than updating an Account Plan.

If an admin just uses the Save button then the changes on the plan will only affect new users and therefore the tight sync between the Account Plan and Accounts becomes greater.

The use of the word Defaults on the account plan page is confusing and not correct after the initial creation of the virtual server, yet the functionality does not change.

The Save and Save and Apply options were introduced to allow users to keep customizations on certain accounts but this came at the cost of keeping accounts and the plans in sync.

What do I propose, an Overview

Firstly, we need to get rid of the Save button as it will be pointless so we will just be left with Save and Apply button and it's logic.

We need to add checkboxes to the 2 pages (Edit Account Plan / Server Owner Limits) to define whether the plan settings can be overridden.

We can either have 1 check box on each page to cover all of the settings (A), or each section can have their own check box to allow for fine grained overriding (B). (B) is my preferred option.

The images below assume the relevant pages have been updated as submitted in #686 and while this is preferable it is not required

The checkboxes have a slightly different function on the different pages as outlined below:

Edit Account Plan

• Allow all of these settings to be overridden / Allow these settings to be overridden
• When this option is ticked, this will allow accounts via Edit Owner Limits to override these plan settings. If it is not ticked then the option to override will be greyed out and they will not be able to change anything in this section.
• When this option is ticked and the admin clicks on Save and Apply accounts where plan members have override these settings on the corresponding section in Edit Owner Limits set to ticked, then these settings will not be overridden.
• If this option is not ticked, this section of the plan will be pushed to all member accounts irrespective of their settings and their override these settings will be unticked and the options greyed out as the permission to override have been removed.
• These settings define if they can be overriden in Edit Owner Limits

Server Owner Limits

• If allowed these checkboxes will allow an account owner to override a particular section of Plan settings and these settings and would not get overridden by a plan update as long as the permissions were maintained in the plan to allow overriding for this section
• if the account owner is not allowed to change a section of settings then they will all be greyed out can cannot be changed by them.

Save and Apply routine
The save and reply routine would need to be upgraded to take into account the booleans in the Account Plan and the Server Owner Limits so it can determine whether it can push settings to that particular account and it's various sections.

Additional

• you could add per account quota overrides.
• the tooltip text will need changing to remove the word default and maybe make them more relevant.
• I would rename Edit Owner Limits to Edit Plan or Override Plan. but limits is the wrong one.
• on the Edit Account Plan I would remove the word default from
  • Default available features
  • Default editing capabilities

[jcameron]

This is an interesting idea, but I worry that it would make the product a bit too complicated. I understand that having the plan override per-domain settings is a potential problem, but maybe the simpler fix is just to warn the user when saving rather than allowing for per-section control of overrides?

[shoulders]

This actually makes Plans easier because:

• plans are enforced from the beginning and none of these new options need touching, maybe never.
• The extra options will allow continued use of Server Owner Limits as is, so you current install base are not affected.
• Sysadmins that what to mess about with settings in Edit Owner Limits for each of their clients can do if they want
  (My Thoughts: This just makes Plans pointless. The whole idea of putting a client on a plan, is that is what they get)
• All the other panels I have seen done do NOT allow individual plan overrides, except sometimes quotas can be overridden i.e. cPanel).
• The check boxes (override options) are completely obvious as to what they do.
• if the new layout (As above) is used, this also reduces comlexity and makes the options clearer.

summary

• A warning is not the way to go It will not fix the underlying issue with the logic on the Account Plans.
• for new users this will be a lot easier because they do not need to touch the override options
• current users that user Edit Owner Limits as overrides per client will be unaffected and these user will not see any extra complexity.

[jcameron]

I'm definitely biased towards solutions that make the UI simpler rather than more complex. Maybe we should just not show per-domain owner limits if a plan is selected?

[shoulders]

My preference is to have accounts plans work as account plans:

• In account plans just have the Save and Apply button
• Don't have the 'Edit Owner Limits' (I always struggled with the purpose of this feature)

But unfortunately we have users that use it like this. This is in a blue skies discussion I had.

https://forum.virtualmin.com/t/account-plan-settings-should-be-read-from-the-plan-and-not-copied/123473

Personally I have 100 domains, 30 of which are on the default plan
The other 70 have maybe one or to options changed from the default plan and are nearly all different .
I don’t really want to maintain 60+ plans as it may be difficult to remember who is on what plan of I could put each domain on it’s own plan and edit the plan each time, edit owner limits is more useful to me, but each to their own

If this is an edge case, then simplicity is better. 😄