RE: Blocks in JLCP

[comments below]

On Sun, 2003-04-20 at 18:31, Paul Hinze wrote:
> Yep, that's what layoutmanager does.
> 
> Pau;
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email protected]
> [mailto:[email protected]]On Behalf Of Matthew
> Schmidt
> Sent: Sunday, April 20, 2003 1:01 PM
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: [jl-volunteers] Blocks in JLCP
> 
> 
> Team,
>     We need to come up with a good way for people to add new blocks to 
> JLCP.  The way that PhpNuke does it I believe is they drop new blocks 
> into the blocks directory of the installation.  There is most likely a 
> simple config file that the block manager could then pick up.  Then the 
> blocks are just HTML.  Anyone have any ideas on how we should handle 
> this?  I think its a pretty important part of the whole scheme and 
> having an easy way to add blocks will make JLCP that much more useful.
> 
> Matt

If I understand correctly though, the layout manager will just handle
getting the block to show up on the page where the user wants it. (Okay,
I'm probably simplifying that too much -- no offense Paul).

My concern is not just that blocks can be added or customized, but that
they will automagically integrate with the existing components.  For
example, if a new block could be searchable or "schedulable" (have
events show up on the calendar) or administrable, then it should do so
with out having to touch the other components.  In other words, the user
just adds the new block via some configuration file or directory
location and the search component just picks it up without any new code
added to the site-wide search engine (which doesn't exist yet).

This can be accomplished with an "intermediate" layer or "component"
manager as was discussed on the IRC meeting.  I'm also very interested
in how the admin console will handle adding new blocks or modules and
configuring them.

I'll be working on an Avalon example of how this could be done.  I
should have something together this week.

-- 
  jaaron    <http://jadetower.org>