Symphony.

I am really like symphony so far, but one thing that I think is missing is some sort of dashboard for the admin. While searching on the forum I found this post. It looks like there are other people that might want something like this too.

I am thinking this might be the first extension I try writing for Symphony. I don’t want to make any assumptions about what every site needs on a dashboard, so I would rather build the extension as a “blank canvas” to witch dashboard widgets could be added. I would like it to include a simple API that other extensions could use to add dashboard widgets and also have a way developers can create their own custom widgets easily.

Does anyone have any input on what they would like to see in a Dashboard extension before I get to work on it?

I’ve done some preliminary work on this as well. The idea is the same: Dashboard as a simple extension with a plugin architecture. I suppose it would make sense to build in some sort of preferences system, allowing devs to set defaults and non-negotiables and letting individual users modify the rest…

Brainstorm of plugins that someone might find useful:

• Back-end activity log
• Various metrics (# of sections, # of entries in sections, # pages, etc)
• Recent destinations (last items/entries you worked on)
• Button to toggle maintenance mode
• Simple messaging/notes (this can be hooked to a Symphony section)
• …

A quick tip for a current way to add a dashboard to the backend:

1. Install these extensions
   • HTML Panel field
   • Static Section
   • Don’t Drop
2. Create a dashboard section (single child of a new navigation group)
3. Make this section static
4. Add some HTML Panel fields to the section
5. Create the pages/datasources according to the HTML Panel fields
6. Optionally set the dashboard section as the default section of your authors

There are only two little flaws with this implementation. The dashboard page still has the Create Entry/Save Changes button at the bottom and the URL shows the edit or new action.

That is a brilliant workaround!

Klaftertief, that’s a pretty amazing idea to get a dashboard up and running right away!

To answer Craig’s earlier question, I like the ones you thought of. In addition, here are some “big picture” things I thought about:

1. Ability to add buttons that link to different areas of the backend.
2. Ability to pull a “feed” from a datasource with links to that content in the backend.
3. Ability to create content in a section quickly (like you said with simple messaging)
4. Simple text box for Instructions, tutorials, etc.
5. Some kind of box like HTML Panel, where you could program it how you would want to.

In the future, I’d want to be able to tie into Google Analytics and pull some information from there. That’d be nice.