MidCOM AJAX user interface

New administrative interface for Midgard has been pondered a lot lately. Administration should be done onsite instead of a separate system. Layout is wanted to be kept as-is.

Toolbar

Toolbar consists of two separate parts at the moment

  1. Page
    • current view or current object (if applicaple)
  2. Folter
    • folder structure
    • component configuration

Midgard 'About' page

Will be added in future

  • notification of new Midgard and MidCOM versions

Content pages

User needs to be notified when something happens. For this ProtoGrowl is used: when an action is taking place there will be an icon apper indicating the action. When the action has been done the icon will fade out.

Administrative panel

There will be an administrative panel, which probably will be located on the right side of GUI. It will provide functionality similar to old Aegir: snippets, configuration et al.

Editing

Editing was done on a separate page, which some users see as a problem, since they cannot see how the page will look like for the users. Now the direction of development is going to composite technique.

Composite will allow the user to double click a textfield to open an editable input box where the item was shown in, or to create a new item. This will provide a lot of flexibility for WYSIWYG content management.

Each composite is its own Datamanager2 schema, which provides the interface for Datamanager2 to store the data.

For Datanager2 schema there is a new datatype called 'composite' where you will define (under key type_config) what is the schema used for the composite box.

At the moment, since composite is an advanced feature, there are no default schemas for composite boxes.

Composite styles are used as normal MidCOM style elements, but named with the guidelines: _dm2_composite__item. These style elements will be wrapped inside span-tags in (X)HTML source output.

The same AJAX editor can be used for more complex features, like adding list items, table cells and so forth - depending on the use case.

So far everything has been done by Henri Bergius and Jerry Jalava of ad agency Incognito. It would be very helpful to get more people working on these issues. At the moment the most important thing is to know how to write Datamanager2 schemas and to work with Prototype JavaScript library.

For the development of composite interface it is important to start using them as much as possible.

Another issue Bergius would like to figure out is multiple languages.


Update: Bergius has written instructions on how to use composite in user forums.

Back