Since a long time we were thinking about how to improve the admin experience... Now the first step has been committed. A so called "overview" page for each collection, resource and the start page. It's not so easy to explain, so see for yourself at http://trunkdemo.bitflux.org/admin/ and login
with demo/demo (If miss-used, I'll shut it down :) ). Click also on some collections and resources on the navi-tree, to see how it's actually supposed to work. Currently it's mainly the context menu remapped to the edit frame, but with much more space for additions.
As the next step will be to redesign (graphically) the whole thing, I'm not interested in hearing what you think about the design (it will change and will be less green ;) ), but I'm really really interested in hearing if you like this approach or if you see further improvements. Or if you would do it completely different.
We also plan to add a Bookmark feature and a LiveSearch option to the top.frame for easy and fast access to the content.
If you'd like you can also check out the new dbforms2 implementation. Choose in the Blog section "Edit Categories/Links" and then something there. Currently only works in Firefox/Mozilla, but IE support is very near (just 2-3 little things are missing).
As we think this addition to the admin is very important (You actually see on first sight after login what you can do and not only after clicking around...), we try to push 1.3 a little bit and try to make a release pretty soon. Even though some other features are not really finished (the metadata search for example). Freeflux.net will then
also be upgraded.
And now, please comment :)
Update: The admin will definitively not look like in the trunkdemo mentioned above. It will be much lighter and more appealing. It's just a proof of concept for the general UI behaviour.
With Chregu now working on DBForms2 as well, we're making a lot of progress. It's now usable to replace most of the old dbform stuff like for example blog posts, categories and others.
Some features are still missing, but they should be implemented next week. Error handling e.g. is still sort of crappy and certainly needs some refactoring.
If you want to have a look at one or more examples, do an 'svn up' on your local copy of the trunk and point your browser to http://your.dom.ain/admin/dbforms2/blogposts . Now you can edit your blogposts using DBForms2.
Keep in mind that DBForms2 is still unstable and could contain severe bugs which might just make ground meat out of your data. So you better make a backup copy of your blog posts table before starting testing ;)
The syntax of the configuration files and the API is also likely to change again, but should not differ much from the current one.
We will add some documentation about the new syntax of the configuration files later on, but if you already want to write your own file today, then just have a look at the files in /dbforms2 where all the configuration files are kept.
We added SSL support to our SVN Server ('cause I couldn't commit during LinuxTag because of blocking of some HTTP Verbs on the port 80 connection, but it also adds additional security of course). Because of this we had to change the svn:externals to ssl as well. With the "problem", that it checks out all externals completely new, if you do a
"svn up" on an already existing installation. Usually no problem, but if you have locally changed files somewhere in the externals, they end up in a directory ending with .OLD and are not anymore in the real directory. Therefore just check those directories the next time you do an "svn up" to see, if there are any files you still need...
Only modified and not checked in files should end up there, but sometimes whole directories end up there (externals on externals seem to be a good candidate for that, which is BXE and Popoon, and normally you won't change that files anyway, so just delete them from the webinc.OLD resp. inc.OLD directories).
Due to these potential problems, we only applied the externals change to the Trunk, the 1_2 branch still points to the non ssl server.
JustBlogIt is a nice little firefox extension for making new blog posts and the BxCMS Blog Plugin has now support for it.
Get it from the site, configure it in the Extension window, choose "Moveable Type" from the dropdown and type in the following URL (adjusted of course :) )
http://example.org/admin/edit/blog/newpost.xml
The options are not recognized right now. Not sure, if they ever will, but as we have MT compability in the XML_RPC interface, I choose that one here, too.
Update: Added a little bookmarklet link for using it without JustBlogIt. Login, go to the blog overview, then at the bottom, there's a "BxCMS bookmarklet" link, drag'n'drop that to your bookmarks and use it :)
Thanks to Philipp, dbforms2 is making good progress, there's now a LiveSearch chooser and many more improvements
I added today wysiwyg capability to dbforms2 for single fields with the help of FCKeditor. Was in the end quite easy, once you know how it works :)
If you have the latest trunk checkout, you can see it in action in http://bxcms/admin/dbforms2/blogposts/
The buttons are customizable, we will add more later ;)
... and warns the user about it.
Trying to edit a patForms form in Kupu, saving it and loosing all the patForm stuff shouldn't happen anymore this way. It still can be done, but the user is at least warned about it.
I didn't find a quick solution for IE, so this only applies when using Mozilla/Firefox
Since a few days, spam comments are coming in again (they stopped for some weeks for me..). All are catched currently by our spamfilter, but nevertheless I added an additional check against XBL. Until now with good results (no false positive, a few false negatives, but the other tests still catched them,
so no spam comments slipped through). Will further observe it and then add it also to the stable branch.
Update: I further improved it, so that it also works on hosts, where a DNS request always returns something. (Net_DNSBL expects an NXDOMAIN, if it's not in the blacklist...)
2nd Update: run http://domain.com/admin/webinc/update/ if you update now. We have a new field called "comment_rejectreason", which is needed in the blog admin. Because the reject reason is now also shown in the blog overview. I plan to remove the "send mail comment", if the comment is rejected (but not when moderated), so we need an overview,
why some comments were rejected.
The current version has support for loading and saving records. There are only few and simple form elements implemented and there is currently no chooser so you cannot select a record to edit.
The next feature to be implemented is the chooser and with that being finished, dbforms2 can already be used to edit simple forms.
I added the possibility to use the fileinfo extenstion to inc/popoon/helpers/mimetype.php instead of the command line "file" utility. Should be more performant (and one less command line thingie we need...). If the extension is not found, we still go to the "file" program.
New Blog Comment mail notifications now contain a direct link to the db-entry for approving/deleting/editing.
We had to change some code in the login procedure, so you have to update the whole tree as the affected files are spread all over the place ;)
You also have to update xml/blogcomment.xml (which is not in the bxcmsng tree but in the bxcmsdemo one), just take the one from the original (or if you still have svn linked to it, an svn up will be enough there). And here's the diff, if you want to change it by hand.
As a suggestion by Sven, we also strip the "br"-tags from the mail to make it look less ugly...
