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Re: Restyled Textpattern Interface
> wilshire wrote:
> IMHO, with the ability to create admin side plugins I think its time to stop publishing hacks to the Textpattern codebase. Its only going to cause problems such as this one. It should be possible to change the styling of pages using a plugin and as several admin plugins have already shown its possible to modify the structure of a page as well. I’ve been able to successfully override the standard textpattern.css styles by changing it on the quikpik preferences tab so I would think its possible in this case too.
Maybe it could be time to discuss the way that whole admin interface is build and structured, particularly the navigation area. That nested table structure is pretty difficult to manage, from an accessibility point of view and from the perspective of adding functionality (like adding tabs).
I see no reasons why that whole navigation area should remain a set of nested tables. The same can be said for other parts (write area, forms and templates).
(and I hope this forum quickly get restyled, I can hook up my user stylesheet again that micro ytpe is unreadable).
Where is that emoji for a solar powered submarine when you need it ?
Sand space – admin theme for Textpattern
phiw13 on Codeberg
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Re: Restyled Textpattern Interface
Agreed phiw13. I think up to this point the emphasis has been on creating an admin interface that functions properly rather than one that can be customized easily. Maybe as we hit the 1.0 milestone some more work will go into cleaning up the admin interface.
This new version of PunBB went table free so maybe the textpattern admin will eventually get there too. If anyones up for it putting together a patch and sending it to the development team as a suggestion couldn’t hurt.
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Re: Restyled Textpattern Interface
If anyones up for it putting together a patch and sending it to the development team as a suggestion couldn’t hurt.
Well we have a good start at a patch for the navigation area discussed in this very thread. It might still be improved, I guess. From a strictly html pov, one could even get rid of the two divs that wrap around the ‘tab’lists. Not that they really hurt, providing additional hooks for styling. The way ArbinShire made the php code, I’ll leave it to brighter php wizheads… . The basic thing there would be: make it as easy as possible for admin plugins to add one or more tabs.
Where is that emoji for a solar powered submarine when you need it ?
Sand space – admin theme for Textpattern
phiw13 on Codeberg
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Re: Restyled Textpattern Interface
Hmm. A patch could easily be submitted relatively soon as the work for the top level navigation has already been done. The next hurdle to overcome, would be the main content area, but that shouldn’t be too difficult. A simple, consistent, table free, structure would allow greater flexibility and allow easy changes, perhaps even by the existing CSS interface.
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Re: Restyled Textpattern Interface
The basic thing there would be: make it as easy as possible for admin plugins to add one or more tabs.
Its already possible to add tabs through plugin code. The quikpik plugin does this as do others such as Andrew’s notepad plugin.
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Re: Restyled Textpattern Interface
The tabbed interface works exactly as it did before, except it doesn’t use a single table at the head of the document. The problem that rss_admin_quikpik is having, is that it coded in such a way that took advantage of the table structure and hooks on to that.
Just looking at the code behind everything that holdes the various text boxes and other assorted items in the textpattern interface, it is going to take longer than I thought to redo (if I decide I want to take this on.) At least Finals for me should be over with tomorrow and as such, I’ll have a week to kill before my next semester begins. It’s always slightly bugged me that the interface used a table layout.
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Re: Restyled Textpattern Interface
I like where this talk is going.
Paul Scrivens (whitespace) did a review of the Textpattern interface once (can’t seem to find it, probably due to the recent Moveable Type crash he had recently…and no, this article is not the one I’m talking about), and had some worthwhile things to say about how the individual panels are not laid-out as well as they could be. I would add to this discussin that If there are changes to the structure of the TxP panels, it would also be a good time to reevaluate how they are organized for default presentation as well.
Last edited by Destry (2005-04-27 18:14:03)
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Re: Restyled Textpattern Interface
Glad to see that this whole thing is taking off. And about using this hack with the rss_admin_quikpik, don’t say I didn’t warn you guys…
Anyways, is there going to be a fix (on some side of the table) for using rss_admin_quikpik and this hack (and or a plugin version of the hack as wilshire says is possible)?
bludrop studios .::. Creative Expression
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Re: Restyled Textpattern Interface
Beside visual things, and the quality of the (html) code, another thing might need improvement : the ability to customize the backend. Mainly adding help here and here, eplanations for special cases, and so on. Without hacking TXP (SVN can handle merging, but we shouldn’t rely too much on this).
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Re: Restyled Textpattern Interface
Destry, did you mean this one?
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Re: Restyled Textpattern Interface
The problem that rss_admin_quikpik is having, is that it coded in such a way that took advantage of the table structure and hooks on to that.
This may just be semantics but rss_admin_quikpik is not having a problem. The purpose of the plugin is to modify parts of the admin interface and the admin interface uses tables. So in my book, the problem is the attempt to use a plugin with hacked Textpattern code.
Now mind you, this is exactly what the quikpik menu was, a hacked version of txplib_head.php. But I can tell you that is was a big pain to update my installations and update the hack each time there was a change to the base code. Considering there isn’t even a stable 1.0 release of Textpattern yet you can assume that code is going to change. Thats why I spent time converting it to a plugin.
Again, I’m not overly familar with what this mod does (although I’ve seen the screenshot and it does look nice) but I don’t think it would be terrible to create as a plugin. Through DOM scripting you could delete the entire set of nested tables and inject your own code and stylesheet. That exactly what the quikpik menu does.
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Re: Restyled Textpattern Interface
> wilshire wrote:
> bq. Thats why I spent time converting it to a plugin.
Time well spent, hack are very much a pain where you know. Most of us probably have a few for very perosnnal things, for “big” things we don’t really need more hack. SVN can merge yes, but to a certain extent, it hasn’t got a brain yet :)
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#28 2005-04-27 20:30:37
- arpan
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- Registered: 2004-12-02
- Posts: 25
Re: Restyled Textpattern Interface
but would that not mean that the entire table based design has to be downloaded as well, in addition to the CSS & DOM code. That kinda defeats the whole purpose. Using CSS is supposed to speed up the site, not slow it down.
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Re: Restyled Textpattern Interface
I would tend to agree with Arpan; downloading all the markup, plus the dom and the new CSS code does get a bit … inefficient?
As of this afternoon, I’ve been toying with the idea of destroying every ounce of table markup in the interface and placing Div’s in its place, although admittedly, this looks to be a bit of a daunting task.
I’m almost positive that most of us have done away with table markup when it comes our own sites, so why then have we allowed the markup to creep into the interface? I’m sure Zem, Kusor, and Dean are busy with more important things than this write now, but this is something that I would definitely like changed.
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Re: Restyled Textpattern Interface
but would that not mean that the entire table based design has to be downloaded as well, in addition to the CSS & DOM code. That kinda defeats the whole purpose. Using CSS is supposed to speed up the site, not slow it down.
Indeed. No argument from me on that. I don’t think there’s any disagreement here. The ideal solution here would be to work on cleaning up the markup used for the admin interface at some point in the future rather than hacking the code of rewriting the page using DOM scripting. Don’t know if its been posted there yet but this would be a good topic to start up in Feature Requests.
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