Symphony.

Hi,

Yesterday my client request me to create a Dashboard that enables the visualization of last articles and registered users. How do I create this kind of extension? Any idea?

I like the way Habari uses the Dashboard.

I think it’s important to Symphony have a Dashboard instead of redirect the user to a default section.

What you think?

Sounds like a good idea. I’d defenitely use it :-)

Edit: Lets make this post more useful

A few thoughts: It could either show “what happened since your last login” or, as czheng said, the last x items of a sitewide event-stream.

I would also like a configurable RSS-Reader, by default pointing to the Symphony Blog.

And maybe configure as many sections as I’d like to show up (the initial idea was a editable list of convenient links).

In fact: any DS and any XSLT, just like a frontend page. And a new DS “system events stream”.

I’ve thought about an extension like this too, though I was imagining a dashboard consisting of a backend activity log (“Craig Logged In,” “Craig Edited the Articles section,” and so on) and maybe some basic metrics (version, extensions installed, # of pages, etc.). All configurable of course…

In Symphony 1.5 - 1.7, there were “widgets”: drawers that drop down below the main menu to provide different views. The original intention was to bring this sort of feature back in the form of an extension. There were three widgets: Search, Calendar, Status.

Search

• Results Box
• Search Field

Calendar

• Entries List
• Select Box with Sections
• “Create New” button
• Calendar with dates highlighted which when clicked would list entries created on that date

Status

• Recent Entries
• Recent Comments
• System Updates (Symphony and Extensions versions)

It would be great to bring this back. It’s one of the great interface design elements that sold me on Symphony in the first place.

The only issue I have with a Dashboard is that it seems like it’s very much focused on the default workspace of a blog. Very few Symphony builds I’ve worked on are anything like a blog (except for my personal site and one or two others), therefore I see it that everything on the Dashboard needs to be configurable since it can’t make any assumptions about your site.

Hmmmm, I like the idea of a dashboard, but I agree that it would be tough to pull off. Every widget would have to be super configurable, because in Symphony, you can’t even guarantee that every entry will have a title and a date, or what exactly those two fields will be called.

I guess one idea for a widget could be to have a little area where you could attach some datasources, write some XSLT, and then the dashboard would be super configurable.

Dashboard aside, that CMS has a sexy interface. :-)

@MrBlank, agreed!

I agree too!

I guess one idea for a widget could be to have a little area where you could attach some datasources, write some XSLT, and then the dashboard would be super configurable.

Mmhmm yes, there’s nothing more configurable than building it yourself! That’s a good idea. So long as the XSLT produced standard HTML, adhering to the Symphony markup then building this using XSLT would make sense. There could even be some XSLT Utilities bundled to which we simply provide XML — it then renders the Dashboard for us (providing standard views of data).