One frequent complaint about MikroTik as a home router, one which is possibly a hindrance in making MikroTik home use more widespread, is the complexity of the interface to a novice user who is more used to D-Link routers and other similar brands.
Now that TR-069 support is available, we are looking at rolling out MikroTik routers to all of our customers as a managed home router. In order to accomplish this, however, we are looking at manually making a webfig skin for our customers to use, so that they have a simpler interface for router management, one that hides most of the tabs and settings that they do not need, but still allows them to do port forwarding etc.
I think it would be ideal if these ‘user level’ skins were a built in feature in the router. Perhaps Webfig skins for Basic, Intermediate, and Advanced users, pre-configured. When the user starts up the router for the first time, they could get a wizard that asks them if they want the Basic, Intermediate, or Advanced interface. Since the skins wouldn’t work in Winbox, the user could be presented with a warning that, if they want to use Winbox to manage the router, they will always see the Advanced interface, and need to use Webfig to see the Basic or Intermediate interface.
Such a feature would not take a lot of new development, since the skin framework is already there. It would simply be a matter of incorporating the skin choice as part of the QuickSet, and creating the default ‘basic’, ‘intermediate’, and ‘advanced’ skins. The actual contents of the default skins could be further customized by individual customers with an .rsc and NetInstall.
This could also be provided, with further development, as a basic router feature (similar to the Simple vs. Advanced wireless configuration, where clicking Advanced adds more menu options), but that would obviously entail more development to accomplish.