Hi, I'm JT and these are my thoughts on community, content management, Plain Black, and WebGUI.
Hi, I'm JT and these are my thoughts on community, content management, Plain Black, and WebGUI.
One of the new features to expect in 7.6 is a new New Content menu. This is actually a whole series of related changes, but I'll get to those in a minute. First let's talk about the new content menu in the admin bar.
The New Content menu is now hierarchical (see attached image). This means you have asset categories containing all the assets. Since we have so many assets these days, categorization seemed like the best way to handle it. Now it may look a little different when the final 7.6 release comes out. For example you may be able to collapse the categories so that the list is a little shorter if you don't use all of them. But in general this is how it will be structured.
You may also note that Packages has been moved under new content, and prototypes have been separated out from regular assets.
The categories that are listed here, and where the assets appear under them was created by polling a few novice WebGUI users to see what their instincts were. I'm giving you, my readers, one opportunity to change my mind about what the default configuration should be, and this is it. Please reply here and tell me what you think of this categorization.
As I said at the beginning of this post, there are several other features that come with this new content menu change. You can create your own and rename the categories, and choose which asset belongs in which category on your own site by editing your config file. You can also set UI Levels and groups on each category. You can modify the properties of each asset, including default values, field labels, and even which tab fields appear on. For that matter, you can even create new tabs that didn't exist before.
As an example of how this can work I edited the properties of the Folder asset. I decided that folders should have a tab called FOO, and that the title should be on the FOO tab. And the title should be renamed to "My Big Title", and be displayed as a text area instead of a text box. Oh, and I never want the menu title to be displayed for folders, so I gave it a UI level of 99. Don't believe me? Well I've attached an image to this post to show you what that looks like. And here's what the config file directives look like to do that:
"WebGUI::Asset::Wobject::Folder" : {
"tabs" : {
"foo" : {
"label" : "FOO"
}
},
"isContainer" : 1,
"fields" : {
"menuTitle" : {
"uiLevel" : 99
},
"title" : {
"tab" : "foo",
"fieldType" : "textarea",
"label" : "My Big Title"
}
},
"category" : "basic"
},
Anyway, I hope you find these new features both useful and exciting. This amazing level of configurability adds power and flexibility for admins, and new levels of usability for users. Just a few more great reasons to use WebGUI.
EDIT: I've uploaded a split view of the new content menu because after the blog resized the full length one it was hard to read.
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User:
bernd
Date: 9/29/2008 3:08 pm |
Rating: -4
Rate [
Status: Approved |
Looks great! Categories are fine.
--
Klettern in Magdeburg
(http://www.klettern-md.de)
|
User:
arjan
Date: 9/29/2008 5:49 pm |
Rating: 7
Rate [
Status: Approved |
Definitely both usefull and exciting!
I would say that the userList is a community thing, that's where I would put it. But hey: it's configurable!
Does this mean that also the default tabs are configurable and the metadata, display and security tabs are not hardcoded anymore to uiLevels 3,5 and 6 respectively?
./WebGUI/Asset.pm: $tabform->addTab("display",$i18n->get(105),5);
./WebGUI/Asset.pm: $tabform->addTab("security",$i18n->get(107),6);
./WebGUI/Asset.pm: $tabform->addTab("meta",$i18n->get("Metadata"),3);
And another question. Do I understand correctly that this makes it possible to hide the default asset, like the collaboration system, and show only the prototype, making the default asset effectively available under a different name. And that you can do this by both a uiLevel restriction or a group restricton. e.g. 1) set the collaboration system to a uiLevel greater than 9 and import a package with Request Tracker prototype for example or 2) put the collaboration system in a category that is only visible to a specific group like admins.
Kind regards,
Arjan Widlak
United Knowledge
Internet for the public sector
