Symphony.

That looks dirty and has a strange smell :o)
As the site I’m working on will no longer be maintained by myself I’m not sure if I should take a hackish approach.

Here’s an idea. Would expanding the default section concept to potentially allow you to set a user to redirect to any Symphony backend page help in any way?

The default section idea is nice, but I often find that when I’m logged in I immediately jump to the Section index or Extension index, so it’s a bit of waste for ‘developers’.

Obviously I don’t think linking to individual entries should be allowed, but opening up the ‘Default Section’ options so that Blueprint pages could also be selected seems like a good idea to me. Possibly implementing a new delegate (or making use of an existing one ExtensionsAddToNavigation perhaps?) could allow extensions to add options to this list as well.

Thoughts?

I agree. My clients always need to jump to a specific page that is updated the most, but I always find myself heading to the components, datasource or sections page first.

What would be particularly useful, was a sort of modular dashboard where you could say, “grab this list of content,” and it would be placed in a little box on the dashboard similar to how Mint does analytics.

Nils are you actively developing a dashboard extension? I was playing with a few more ideas earlier and I’m keen to progress, but I don’t want to duplicate work you’ve already achieved.

Shall I continue with my prototype?

What would be particularly useful, was a sort of modular dashboard where you could say, “grab this list of content,” and it would be placed in a little box on the dashboard similar to how Mint does analytics.

That’s exactly what I’m planning. Any extension can offer a number of “panels” which can be be pinned to the dashboard. The Dashboard extension itself will provide “default” panel types for common tasks, but other extensions can provide their own if they wish. Possible ideas so far:

• Craig’s Documenter could pull in documentation somehow
• my forthcoming Entry Versions can show a list of recent edits from all users
• a stats (e.g. Google Analytics) extension could show a summary graph (if someone developed such an extension)
• Michael’s newsletter sending system could show sending status of a big email job
• A blog site could show the most recent unmoderated comments

That sort of thing. I’m hoping to make it as generic and lightweight as possible so that it can be used in creative ways.

Nick, I’ve been playing with your code and tweaked the extension driver a bit (some links weren’t working when your install resides in a subfolder) but I stopped working on the extension when I hit the redirect problem. So feel free to continue developing. I can push my changes to GitHub tomorrow when I’m back at university but it’s not that much yet.

Ok, thanks. I’ll carry on with what I’ve got. I may end up re-working what I’ve done so far anyway!

Here’s a 2 minute screencast of my progress:

http://screenr.com/pQX

Creating a new panel “type” is as simple as writing an extension that subscribes to three delegates that provide the name of the panel (for the dropdown list), the configuration options when adding a new panel (an XMLElement) and the panel itself (an XMLElement).

The Dashboard extension provides these three “core” panel types (Datasource to Table, RSS Feed Reader and Symphony Overview) but any extension can provide any number of new panel types itself.

Amazing work, nick.

Wow!

At what point do you think it will be safe to start using this? Either on our own sites (where less-stable stuff isn’t as dangerous) or on client sites?

Also… Wow! That looks amazing! That’s going to be REALLY powerful with Symphony 3’s layout mechanism.

Dashboard has been released! Further chatter here:

http://symphony-cms.com/discuss/thread/48297/