Re: Administration Pages - Modifying Data Displayed

wwalkerbout wrote:

> 
> You were correct in that the Module did install. I can view the Overview 
> Page without any problems. But if I go to the "Modify Config" option, I get 
> the following error message:
> 
> Fatal error: Class 'xarCore' not found in 
> C:\zzxampp\xampp\htdocs\wtbase\modules\simpleadmin\xaradmin\modifyconfig.php 
> on line 21

Yes, that's another one of the new Xaraya classes: xarServer, xarRequest 
and so on.
> 
> Perhaps I may be able to grab the Xaraya II branch fom Monotone to get a 
> look at the features. I was really interested at this early stage as to how 
> you went about organizing things, as I tend to get a lot of comment from my 
> friends about the Admin in Xaraya not being intuitive at all in its current 
> format.

Well I think there are 2 issues here:

- on the one hand you have the inherent complexity of the system itself. 
With more power comes more complexity.

- on the other hand there is the issue of how you present this 
complexity to the admin.

I'm personally of the opinion that certain things are simply complicated 
because it's their nature, and trying to remove that complexity just 
hobbles the functionality. If someone doesn't get the paradigm or tries 
to apply the mindset of say PostNuke or Joomla, it's going to be 
difficult. A different paradigm is obviously a good starting point for 
understanding Xaraya, but you have to then take the leap as it were to 
understand the system in its own terms.

So I am saying that if things are not always intuitive, in part it may 
be that the intuition, not the system, needs recalibration. *in part* :)

On the other hand not *all* this complexity needs to be shoved in an 
admin's face. And if you have fewer things staring back at you from the 
screen it's easier to figure out what your inportant optins are.

SimpleAdmin tries to address this by letting you define "panels" that 
define what the admin sees. A panel is simply a set of reasonably 
related configuration functionality in a display. For instance you may 
want your admins to be able to change the site name and slogan in the 
themes module, but perhaps they shouldn't be able to turn on or off 
comments in the html source. The latter is more of a debugging thing.

So the module gives you an infrastructure on which to build these little 
panels yourself (with a bit of php of course) or enable and disable them 
as you see fit for each module. In the case of roles and privileges it 
lets the admin create "standard" roles and privileges that can then be 
applied to a group or a user. This last part is a bit hobbled at present 
because there are really not many agreed upon "standards" for such 
things. But this will no doubt change over time.

Marc