Writing a new plugin in Flux CMS is an easy task, if you know how :) But now, it's even easier. I wrote a little script, which takes all the necessary tasks off you. Just call from the commandline:
php inc/bx/tools/generate/plugin.php
give the plugin a name and the script will generate the following files:
inc/plugins/yourplugin.php
themes/{folder}/yourplugin.xsl
data/yourplugin/.configxml
And you can start coding (and directly testing it with calling http://example.org/yourplugin/)
But it can more than that. If you already have a database table with data, which the plugin should use, you can tell the installer that (without the table prefix). It will then automatically create the necessary dbforms2 XML document (in the dbforms2/ directory), so that you can directly start editing the data with dbforms2 (just call it with http://example.org/admin/dbforms2/tablename/). The example XSLT and the plugin also uses then this DB data, outputs it as overview and in detail view.
Notice: The table needs to have the correct tablePrefix (bxcms_ by default) and a columns named "id".
Hope that helps in creating new plugins and getting started faster with Flux CMS.
Update: I made a little screencast about setting the db-table up, creating the plugin and editing the data with dbforms2 (there's no audio, btw :) )
As I tested Opera 8 yesterday and realized that it works quite well with the latest Opera 8 releases, I invested some time and fixed some remaining CSS problems and all looks good now :) In the same go, I fixed some MS IE issues with the blog editor, so that should look better now, too.
The "half" in the title means, that it will not be thoroughly and always tested by us in the future, so new issues may leak in in the future. And for example the cropping feature of the image editor doesn't work either and we don't have any plans to fix that :) And dbforms2 has some issues as well. But that's the same with Safari and currently IE. We'll fix it for IE, but Safari (and maybe opera) is still lacking some XPath features, AFAIK, so that won't happen soon.
Update: Konqueror 3.4 also works ;)
We plan soon to upgrade all Freeflux.net accounts to the 1.3 branch and with that to the new admin look&feel. Before it hits the masses, it should be tested a little bit more. Whoever likes to do that, drops us a note, either here in the comments or via the contact form.
You can either open a new Freeflux account specifically for this tests or we just upgrade your existing account already now to the 1.3 branch. The upgrade should be painless and if something nevertheless goes wrong, we do have backups :)
If you start testing and hit some bugs or have other suggestions for improvements, just post them to the forum.
Some other features relevant for the common Freeflux user we added to the 1.3 branch are:
- Blog: Improved spam checker (check against XBL, works with "default" DNS servers) (more)
- Blog: Tags for entries (more)
- Blog: Added geolocation properties (more)
- Blog: Added bookmarklet code (JustBlogIt compatible) (more)
- Editors: liveSave for oneform editor added (more)
- Editors: Updated Kupu-Code to latest release (more)
- dbforms2: Replacement for very old dbforms code (more)
BTW, the dbforms2 layout will change a little until the official update.
Thanks for your help.
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.
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 ;)
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've just commited the first version of our new DBForms2. DBForms2 will be the replacement for the currently used dbform editor. Besides all the features implemented in dbform it will have some new and amazing features as well.
Have a look at the feature set in our wiki if you're interested in what will be possible.
The current version can only generate data from a form configuration file but there will be more functionality soon :)
