collective thread: admin-area improvements

[stm999999999]

in several threads (german and english) there are some ideas and discussion for an improvement of the admin area - the side of s9y no visitor will see anytime, but every blogger has to deal with all the time.

If you have a new thread please make a reply, I will add it to this post.

List:

alternative editor-page (german)

http://board.s9y.org/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=15181&start=0
summary for non-german-speakers: some IMHO important things like save/preview not under or between the body-areas but on the right side. no need to open a category-form, all is visible, some improvements to the preview/save/status-area (preview and save should not equal, these are different things) - newest file: http://board.s9y.org/viewtopic.php?f=10 ... 222#p87222

new ideas for another sectioning and renaming of the menu-items:

http://board.s9y.org/viewtopic.php?f=10&p=87185#p87185

the same, but now in english: http://board.s9y.org/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=15270&start=0


and the same thread but with a topic-drift to dropdown-menue:

german http://board.s9y.org/viewtopic.php?f=10&p=86954#p86954
english http://board.s9y.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=15241&start=0


more usibility in the editor

http://board.s9y.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=15180&start=0


Enable scrolling while dragging a plugin around

http://board.s9y.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=15205



Please DO NOT discuss these topics here, use the linked threads or make a new one!

[Don Chambers]

Actually Stephan, perhaps a consolidation of these issues into a single thread might be a good idea, especially if in English only (no offense intended to German speakers)??

I am going to remove myself from the discussion so others can offer their input. You guys have already seen my interpretation of an admin page, and perhaps it is time for others to step in with their ideas without being limited by my opinions of the current design. The current design (part of bulletproof) was just a step along the path of evolution... I am certain there are plenty more steps remaining!

[stm999999999]

Actually Stephan, perhaps a consolidation of these issues into a single thread might be a good idea,

hm, I am not sure. IMO there are many independent issues. putting all together can give us chaos.

especially if in English only (no offense intended to German speakers)??

but of course it would be better to talk about developer issues in only one language (english), even if this is some times a little bit hard. for me: english is in general no problem, but sometimes there are technical phrases I have to look for and for complex issues it is easyer to write and think(!) in my native language

So, the bilingual-issues should be united.

I am going to remove myself from the discussion so others can offer their input. You guys have already seen my interpretation of an admin page, and perhaps it is time for others to step in with their ideas without being limited by my opinions of the current design.

Please, do not so!

1) I think there are many ways to felicity - I think we should give the user the choice (e.g. we give the choice to use wysiwyg or not, to use extended javascript ...) of backend-layout. So - for me - it is not about a replacement but a addendum,

And everbody can have good ideas for this!

2) there are some issues indipendend from the layout: e.g. the ... (even now I have to think about the right words ) ... rearrangement and renaiming of some menu-items. Or the changes for the editor-area. replace tables with divs. or my dream in this scope: free placement of the editor-things (categories, tags, Publish, ...) like in wordpress

[stm999999999]

Update of the list: http://board.s9y.org/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=15270&start=0 ideas for rearrangement of admin-menu

[onli]

Enable scrolling while dragging a plugin around: http://board.s9y.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=15205

[chrisbra]

I have another suggestion.

Implement something like an update notifier, that tells you, whenever a new version is available. This could be put on the admin start-page, which is empty anyways and looks pretty ugly.

A further extension would be to allow the user to have some kind of dashboard in the admin start page and let the user decide which widgets would be put on that page. So he could choose how the admin-page looks (e.g. overview of statistics, last comments, tags, simple-editor widget, or something).

I think this could make a huge improvement of the usability.

(I have been thinking about hacking an update notifier together, but this would mean there is a reliable way to determine the latest serendipity version available and I did not find any way to do so. If there is (an web-service maybe?), just tell me, and I'll give it a try).

[garvinhicking]

Hi Chris!

We have a dashboard plugin in spartacus, that has some kind of "widget" attribute to it. A version check is something that's been on my radar for a long time, but I haven't really had a good idea on how to solve the server part of it...

How about fetching a link like:

Code: Select all

http://svn.berlios.de/viewcvs/*checkout*/serendipity/trunk/docs/RELEASE

that I just created? Maybe this could be integrated into the dashboard plugin, would you like to have a look to contribute?

Best regards,
Garvin

[chrisbra]

Hi Chris!

Code: Select all

http://svn.berlios.de/viewcvs/*checkout*/serendipity/trunk/docs/RELEASE

that I just created? Maybe this could be integrated into the dashboard plugin, would you like to have a look to contribute?

Sure, I'll have a look at it.

[chrisbra]

Hi garvin,

Maybe this could be integrated into the dashboard plugin, would you like to have a look to contribute?

Just yesterday I got time to look at it. I think I have a very very first rough version available. There are a couple of rought edges and it is not yet ready to get included. But before working further, I'd like to know, whether it is possible, to have some kind of well-known shortcut-names for the latest s9y Version available, so the plugin does always know the latest version to download. If I understand the logic right, the latest stable s9y-version is always available at:
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/php- ... z?download
but for the latest snapshot, I'll would have to create a link like this:
http://www.s9y.org/snapshots/s9y_<date>.tar.gz
where the plugin has to make an educated guess, whether todays' version is already available

So would it be possible to provide links like
http://www.s9y.org/snapshots/s9y_beta_latest.tar.gz for the beta version and
http://www.s9y.org/snapshots/s9y_latest.tar.gz for the stable version?

By the way, I'll will be absent for the next one or 2 weeks, so it might take some time, until I can finish it.

regards,
Christian

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

As for the snapshots, I've contacted jannis, the provider.

Providing an automated "latest" release version is hard, because it would mean I'd have to put up two releases, which is always a very tidious task to do. So parsing the latest "version" file would be IMHO the safer thing to do. :-/

For the next release I could try to upload it also to the s9y.org server, that could be an alternative. Providing a "latest snapshot" should be doable with a symlink, Jannis iwll get back to us on that.

Thanks,
Garvin

[chrisbra]

Hi garvin,
here http://www.256bit.org/~chrisbra/s9y/ser ... board.diff is a first version of the update notifier.

Is this what you had in mind? Should we move this topic to a new thread?

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

That's great! Perfect, just what I also had in mind. One minor thing: split() is deprecated as of PHP 5.3, could you change that to use explode() or preg_split? Then I could commit your great patch

Regards,
Garvin

[chrisbra]

done.

regards,
Christian

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

Committed!

One thing that came to my mind: MAybe you could use the HTTP_Request method to open the URL? Currently this only works when PHP's allow_url_fopen wrappers are enabled. You could check the spartacus plugin for example on "HTTP_Request" for an example on how to make use of that method, if you'd have the time? (Which I'm lacking this week, sadly)

Regards,
Garvin

[stm999999999]

would anyone be angry if I split this thread and branch off the detailed discussio into its own thread?

It should be wise to do it as I wrote in the starting posting:

Please DO NOT discuss these topics here, use the linked threads or make a new one!