I think you misunderstand me. If we approached say 10 commercial organizations (such as yourself) that use NR in their product lines to help fund an independent programmer for 6 months to deliver the next iteration of the community dashboard - would you be prepared to put money towards that ?
Lets say a fultime "hot" programmer is costs $150,000 for 6 months contract work - would you put $15K towards that ?
Craig
Why not setup a trial instance and install it and see ??
Yes it is very similar in appearance
Craig
Because I have way too many balls in the air as it is and I don't care to take time away from them to play with this when
is all I need to know. Thanks
I'm really happy to see this thread getting some attention.
unified-red has an issue of requiring a user to setup a database. Also last time I checked it does not track updates to dashboards ui.js for things like correct ip address for client fix.....etc.
Asking users to config their settings.js file after install of the node adds a barrier too.
unified-red is a step in the right direction but lacks support from the community ATM. I really think it could take off if it was not so dependent on the original fork from dashboard and made the installation a few steps easier.
@TotallyInformation has been helping me get my feet wet; though I feel like I'm treading water neck high at the moment with uibuilder. If we could get more people, with some code skills, to try out ver 5 I'm sure it could be a replacement in 2023. If not thats fine too. What ever is best and most popular is where I will spend my time trying to contrib and get a few PR's accepted.
I've decided to jump ship early to something, any thing, because I don't want to get caught when dashboard becomes unsupported. For now its uibuilder. As no updates for almost 4 months on this thread I felt the need to move on to something.
The getting stuck in old standards and code will bite you in the end. Some day I hope its a decade or more node-red will be something else. Nothing ever lasts forever in the tech field. I remember when I went from a 300baud modem to my 2400baud and could get my BBS msg in less than 5seconds. I thought ...."This is it. It will never be better than this"
I wouldn't worry, I always feel like that too!!
v5 (currently the vNext branch on GitHub) is motoring along quite nicely at the moment, I'll post an update soon. It includes a number of new and changed features that should open uibuilder up further for this kind of use.
This is one of the reasons I've avoided adding ExpressJS session handling.
v5 now has both IP address tracking and a separate, uibuilder provided client identifier (to avoid the issue where the socket.io id changes if you reload the page). This is about as far as it is realistically possible to go without server-side storage which absolutely must be defined by the admin not be uibuilder.
Of course, uibuilder also has a number of middleware capabilities that you can add for yourself both for ExpressJS and Socket.IO (both connection and message level). So that you can further extend the server-side processing. There is also now the ability to handle instance-specific API's to your uibuilder node.
As always, I'm striving to make uibuilder as open as possible.
That's also why some of the VueJS specific functions in the front-end library are being extended to work without Vue as well - notably the "toast" notification feature in this release.
Of course, all additions and extensions make uibuilder a little larger which is why the uibuilder html file is now optimised for release and why the js as been refactored to also optimise it (to say nothing of making the whole thing massively easier to understand and change).
I will send you a PM Craig about your question and keep on topic.
There are lots of good discussions about the next version of the dashboard. Personally, I would love to see and contribute to the official Node-RED dashboard development.
This sums up a lot of my feelings and fears. I don't want to be stuck with my ~60 pages being frozen in time and don't want to be rushing to try and rebuild them overnight due to a breakage of some kind.
I also can't afford to rebuild the entire site 2 or 3 times because of dashboard platform changes.
Is there a time update from the very first post to this thread? December 2021?
Well yes it may one day end up frozen in time... but still working... like windows 95 etc etc... hopefully that is a way away, so you won't have to rush to update, but eventually it will happen. Maybe by then there will be a "retro Node-RED" scene where people get together and run emulators to see how this old stuff looked back in the day 
Is there a (public) discussion somewhere else about a new dashboard? No official updates in this thread recently.
This thread is the only thread of activity. There haven't been many updates because no-one has had the bandwidth to move the discussion forward - a point that has been made a few times.
After spending around 10 hours looking for, reviewing and test driving as much as I can, here is my current Node-RED dashboard replacement quest status.
Open MCT.
I really like the flexibility of this, but I think that is also its downside for my user base. Anything that requires a ~100 page manual to work is a bit much.
As for getting data into it from my existing Node-RED I was looking at this fork of it here that uses MQTT.
Node.js Dashboard.
This looks great at first glance, but does not seem to have any way to send data to the dash beyond their (paid) version of Node-RED.
Envato Elements.
Some of these look great, but I could not find a way to easily connect them to my Node-RED project.
uibuilder
I have around 60 or 70 tables in my existing flow, I found some sample HTML code to display a table, but after a few hours work could not figure out how to connect data from Node-RED to the table.
Freeboard.
Looks great, easy to use, but does not seem to be multiuser (I could be wrong).
unified-red
Very quick and easy to install, nice looking, works seamlessly with existing project. Ticks all the right boxes.
Seems to be rejected by the community and has become abandon-ware. (I had some questions and could not find answers).
FlowForge
The 0.1 release adds teams and projects.
Are we going to see a multiuser dashboard in time?
Note: This summary is just my first take. It should not be meant to be taken as a decision or conclusion. Any issues with any of these apps are 100% my fault. I just hope to save some people some time and focus the conversation.
In my view, MQTT should not be a dependency for a dashboard.
Sheesh! Have you seen the dependencies for building it! Reads like a whats-what of every single package in npm! It has both Angular AND VueJS in there!
Honestly, this is more a compeditor for Gafana than it is a component to attach to Node-RED 
These are just dashboard templates, not a solution. You need an account and probably cannot adopt these into Node-RED's licensing. Though there are loads of similar sites out there with similar templates.
Worth noting that you can probably use most of these templates with uibuilder if you wanted to
Happy to help you look at that if you want some help. Because uibuilder does not require a specific framework, there are lots of ways of doing it, we just need to better understand your requirements. Certainly I've seen several examples and I have a reasonably complex example myself based on a list of seen network devices that is partly updated by a script and partly by user input.
On the other hand, uibuilder is not meant to be a stand-alone replacement for a low-code dashboard but rather a component for such. There is, however, an outline of a plan to create dashboards with uibuilder's help and there are various designs in early form for both a full point-and-click layout designer, a configuration-based designer and component designs. Requires people to make something happen more quickly.
Not updated in over 6 years!
Has a DB as a requirement which isn't so easy for many people.
Abandoned? It was updated only 3 weeks, 5 days ago
I personally think, with a bit effort the database requirement could be negated or hidden internally. That would make it more approachable.
It says on the unified-red page that it uses Angular 9. Isn't that version out of support already?
Yeah but there is an upgrade path for angular 2+ unlike angular.js
OK. Understood.
Just as an FYI, FlexDash continues to work https://tve.github.io/flexdash/ and I've been making updates including support for login (user/pass) and additional widgets, some of these are not yet released. I'm currently using FD to implement a dashboard for a non-NodeRed rPi project and will need to circle back to NodeRed so I can finally convert my remaining "standard" dashboard tabs. Note that FlexDash allows you to convert tabs incrementally by iframing the existing dashboard tabs...
I was originally hoping to port FD to Vue 3 and Vuetify 3, but the release of the latter is going slow, so I think I better get everything nailed in Vue 2 and push out the upgrade 'til Vuetify 3 really settles...
One the questions I have in my mind is whether it's possible for a "3rd party" NR dashboard to gain enough momentum to have multiple maintainers and what it would take to get there. I started FD for myself and I'm really excited that I could use it as-is for a project that is not based on NodeRed, which proves that the concept works more broadly and it makes sense for me to continue investing. But supporting NR users is a different level... Also, from prior discussions in this thread it's clear that having UI nodes show up in the NR editor is a must-have, and I have plans for doing a proof-of-concept for that, but it's not something I can really push to production quality.
Some eye candy from this other app:
Very Nice !!
Could you show us an example of a current NR dashboard embedded in an iframe with some of your dashboard also ? i.e. how seamless is it and is that a way forward ?
Not sure how we get some momentum here to get a community maintained dashboard - Julian seems that farthest along - but his stuff is pretty daunting and is all a build it from scratch thing.
Craig
Here's a tab from my standard NR dashboard:
Here's a tab from my FlexDash dashboard (same NR server), these are all FlexDash widgets:
Here's the first tab (standard NR) as iframe in FlexDash:
I still use the standard NR dashboard version hence I've kept the green top nav bar. Once I switch completely to FD I'll drop the green top-nav 'cause it's redundant with FD's tab nav.
And this is the configuration for that iframe tab in FD:
UIBuilder is a different thing. It's much lower level, open to any UI framework/toolkit, DYI type of stuff. FlexDash is Vue+Vuetify with a specific back-end to front-end message model, point-and-click configuration, no coding required. One is not better than the other, they serve different purposes/use-cases.
For me the big to-do on the FlexDash side is to take one of the std dashboard UI nodes and turn it into a FD equivalent node. E.g. "replace your std UI button node with this FD button node". The hard part is reverse-engineering how the std UI button node works and while I'm interested in doing that as a sample for one node, I don't think I will be able to muster the energy to go through all the UI nodes and do the same...
Hi @tve,
Nice to have you back here!
I don't think that any/most of the ui node developers expects you to do all the migration work. Personally I would already be very thankful if you would find time and energy to setup a poc with a single ui node, so we at least have an idea which way to go in the future... And it doesn't even needs to be one of my own ui nodes 
.
And don't hesitate to start a new discussion to ask information about the current ui nodes, whenever you find time to have a look at them!
Bart
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