Re: Administration Pages - Modifying Data Displayed

Hi Marc,

See my comments below.

<[email protected]> wrote in message 
news:[email protected]...
>
> Yes, that's another one of the new Xaraya classes: xarServer, xarRequest 
> and so on.
>

I think it will pay for me to wait for Xaraya II.

Because I tend to get a week or two every few months to play with it, I 
never really get to a stage where I have time to dig into the nuts and bolts 
of Xaraya. But I come from a coding background (many years back), and it is 
the technical complexity and sheer power of Xaraya that attracted me in the 
first place. I found the inital learning curve steep but, while I haven't 
done any new reseach lately on the latest CMS oferrings, still think Xaraya 
is one of the most flexible and all encompassing CMS Frameworks around.

>
> 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* :)

Understood. As far a the complexity in the Administrative side of Xaraya is 
concerned, I think the current Admin Area does a great job for a "Super 
Administrator", the person(s) responsible for maintaining and configuring 
the overall environment. It is the technical complexity which make Xaraya 
great, but those controls are definitely needed to manage that complexity.

>
> 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

What you have described here is exactly what I am after. At the present 
time, when I present many of the Admin Pages to "Site Admin" users, they get 
a lot of additional features that are needed by the "Super Administrator" 
but are distractions to the Site Admin user. So I need to be able to present 
them with a less cluttered interface.

At this stage, I will look into adding some in-page code to the 
"admin-whatever.xt" files in my Theme to see if I can at least simplify 
things along the lines you have mentioned, especially as I have probably 
only a few more days of Xaraya fun before hrading back on-the-road.

>From there, I can't wait until I see the release of at least a Beta of 
Xaraya II. Any "ballpark" estimates on when that may occur?

Thanks again for the great feedback!!!

Cheers,


Wayne