Symphony.

The concept overview of Symphony 2 RC1 as well as Allen's screencast gave us an impression of what we are likely to see in the upcoming release of Symphony. As far as I understand the statements the extensibility and modularity will greatly improve.

One thing I have been thinking about recently are different entry views: By now we all know the list view that can be sorted by columns but what about a grid view for media center like sections? This grid could consist of image thumbs and/or file type icons for documents, movies etc. that should be activated in the upload field settings. As a more simplistic approach it could be possible to show image previews inside the standard entry list.

I'm not sure if this should be a core concept or an extension, but it would be great if the overhauled interface was designed in a way that allows different entry views.

As I understand it, this is just the sort of thing that a backend type extension will let us do, now that the backend is done in xsl.

XSLT has a very cool built-in way of overriding templates via the priority attribute, but I'm not sure if there's a good way to make use of this to allow extensions to change the display of admin pages. The way we're allowing for this is via delegates which can alter the source XML which is then transformed to produce the admin HTML, so fully replacing pages, or adding new pages is pretty easy, but modifying an existing page is not. I can't think of any good way to allow for this which doesn't create the possibility of two extensions conflicting, but it's not too much of a set-back since I also can't think of an extension that would require this behaviour and which could not be implemented in another way.

Nils, my suggestion for your idea would be for an extension to provide a settings page where you can choose which view to use for each section, and this would replace its link in the navigation (/symphony/content/my-section/) with a link to the extension's page (/extensions/my-extension/grid/my-section/) that provides the alternate view style.