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Re: Standardized Plugin Help
Why would you need to see specific classes defined in the plugin help page? Surely if the structure kept to basic HTML elements such as lists, headings, paragraphs, pre boxes, code tags etc. and then those elements were also catered for in the theme’s stylesheet, you would not need to start adding classes to them at all.
The UI elements that plugin authors would use elsewhere is a different matter – that would definitely need some classes defined and suchlike. We need to come up with a wishlist of those to start with and progress from there.
For example, off the top of my head:
- Containers
- Tabs and pills
- Tables
- Accordions
- Form elements
- Single buttons and button groups
- Dropdowns
- Inline labels
- In-page navigation
What else do plugin authors need in their toolkit, let me know?
Last edited by philwareham (2012-04-10 22:58:45)
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Re: Standardized Plugin Help
philwareham wrote:
What else do plugin authors need in their toolkit, let me know?
- Containers + grids, groups, boxes, sets. Three columns, four columns etc.
- Modern (actually usable) pagination, multi-edit controls and list view controls.
- Search forms, auto-complete, live search suggestions.
- Modal windows, popups. Depending on JavaScript native
alertandconfirm(as TXP does now) is not a good thing. If anything, they just get blocked by browsers. - In addition to labels, color sets / control types. If a div has class disabled, it looks disabled. If table row has class active it looks active.
- General tool icon set. Icons for editing, options, info etc. Best bet might be to go with an existing open webfont(?).
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Re: Standardized Plugin Help
Some of the above could be added to my theme work pretty quickly. Icon sets, labels/colour sets, grids could be done in a matter of days. Others will need some extensive structural changes in the HTML.
I’ve already done some investigation of responsive modal boxes and got some workable solutions – for AJAX injected content it works fine in iOS devices (not got any andriod devices for testing yet) but I’m having some issues with cross-domain content via modals such as the pophellp pages. iframes are almost totally unusable in iOS due to scroll issues so can’t use that as a solution – I dislike iframes anyway.
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Re: Standardized Plugin Help
Ideally the help content on rpc.textpattern.com could be provided using JSON. I.e. requesting:
GET http://rpc.textpattern.com/help/?item=body&language=en-gb&type=jsonWould give out a nice JavaScript object, e.g.
var _txp_help = {
'title' : 'Article Body',
'lang' : 'en-gb',
'description' : 'The main content of an article is contained within the article body.\n\nWhen composing or readying articles for publication in Textpattern, you can switch between three views of the article: plain text, XHTML (the code with which a web browser renders the article), and a rendered preview.'
};Which allows using the content for anything. From any programming language including client side JavaScript. And no cross-domain restrictions.
Likely isn’t that hard to make even. Just a different display mode to the current help item pages.
Last edited by Gocom (2012-04-11 08:40:43)
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Re: Standardized Plugin Help
philwareham wrote:
Why would you need to see specific classes defined in the plugin help page?
Why does Gocom prefer using paragraphs for the list of attributes in the plugin help? As I understand it, it’s because the default style for a list doesn’t work well for displaying a list of attributes. That is just one example.
I’ll stick to inline styling for now ;)
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Re: Standardized Plugin Help
ruud wrote:
I’ll stick to inline styling for now ;)
Or you could help us add the missing components into the project, thus helping everyone in the future.
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Re: Standardized Plugin Help
Right, I’ve thrown the starts of a UI page together. Mainly for my own benefit with my own admin theme work, but I’ve also rendered the classic (remora extended) theme in it just to see how unusable the current Textpattern UI is:
Urgh. I could beat the classic UI into slightly better shape with a little work, which would go some way to address some of the limitations mentioned previous in this thread (even though I don’t really want to as it’s a bit of a mess quite frankly). Since most admin themes use that as a base starting point I think it would not break backwards compat in any great way.
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Re: Standardized Plugin Help
Right, I’ve thrown the starts of a UI page together
Phil, that’s most helpful! Thank you for persevering so diligently with making improvements. It may take time to be adopted but your action will make a difference, I’m sure.
TXP Builders – finely-crafted code, design and txp
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Re: Standardized Plugin Help
philwareham wrote:
Hi Phil I was looking at your theme and although much better than the classic one, there are still problems with images (on FF11. + on a friend’s ipad). I’m not sure what your approach regarding those might be.
Yiannis
——————————
NeMe | hblack.art | EMAP | A Sea change | Toolkit of Care
I do my best editing after I click on the submit button.
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Re: Standardized Plugin Help
colak wrote:
Hi Phil I was looking at your theme and although much better than the classic one, there are still problems with images (on FF11. + on a friend’s ipad). I’m not sure what your approach regarding those might be.
Can you be more specific as to what the problem is? I’m constantly testing progress on my iPad and in Firefox and not spotted anything obvious. Post your findings in the Github project. Thanks.
Also bear in mind the theme is for Txp v4.5 (so only works with SVN builds at the mo) and that it is nowhere near finished yet.
Last edited by philwareham (2012-04-12 14:25:36)
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Re: Standardized Plugin Help
philwareham wrote:
Can you be more specific as to what the problem is? I’m constantly testing progress on my iPad and in Firefox and not spotted anything obvious. Post your findings in the Github project. Thanks.
Hi Phil,
As I mentioned earlier I’m not sure as to what you are trying to achieve re the images so it is very unfair for me to comment. I’m not a member of github (or know how to use it) but here’s a screen shot of what I see on FF.
>Edit. Took screen shot down.
Last edited by colak (2012-04-13 06:28:03)
Yiannis
——————————
NeMe | hblack.art | EMAP | A Sea change | Toolkit of Care
I do my best editing after I click on the submit button.
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Re: Standardized Plugin Help
Yes. I’ve not created rules for those image alignments yet. They are purely there as a possible future rule I might add to help admin plugin authors (image alignments are not in the core themes either) – they don’t appear at all in the admin area at present.
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