Symphony.

Man alive, this extension is fantastic. :)

This is great. Just one thing though, I would expect to go straight to the dashboard after logging in, but it still takes me to the default section for the user. Would it be possible have an option to start on the dashboard instead of a default section? Or maybe this is already possible and I am just missing something?

Or maybe this is already possible and I am just missing something?

It’s in the works. I tried hijacking the login event but I managed to break other things. Most likely this extension will create a “dummy” section when you install it “Symphony Dashboard” perhaps, which you’ll be able to set as a user’s default section. That’s the intention anyway.

Nick, I hijacked your Dashboard today and changed it according to my needs:

• Dark configuration panel to better distinguish between the settings and the dashboard itself.
• Implemented localisation support and added German translation.
• Unified similar labels and strings.

I sent you an email with further details.

Looks pretty!

@Nils: I was thinking the same thing re:distinguishing the settings, but I feel like maybe this is a bit too dark? Feels very heavy.

I reused the Subsection Manager styles for it. Interestingly Johanna told me this evening that she imagined the Dashboard completely dark.

It resembles the Symphony 1.7 widget style (which I quite liked).

Personally, I think the dark works, and not just because it fits in with Subsection Manager (which I use on all my sites at this point).

I think the slidey dark ninja panel works quite well.

Thanks for the email Nils, great work as ever!

I agree with Craig that the styling feels really heavy. When it loads full width all I see is a black background with white bars running across it — I cannot immediately distinguish that they are input elements. I’ve lightened the styling considerably. How about this:

I was also thinking about your comments about the panel styles themselves. I took inspiration from Mint, but I think they do look quite clunky. In borrowing the UI direction from Symphony 3 beta, how about this:

Much crisper and cleaner. Although it uses the “true” blue-greys of S3 (i.e. #aaa to #eee) rather than the muddier brown-grey of S2, so they don’t match exactly.

Interestingly Johanna told me this evening that she imagined the Dashboard completely dark.

That could be interesting! Would love to see a mockup :-)

Maybe a middle ground would be to use the colour that fields use in the Section Editor? ;)

I like it whatever way!

I’d still prefer a darker style as it clearly emphasizes that we are entering a different mode.

Concerning the panels: That’s much better, Nick. And I think it’s a good idea to borrow elements from Symphony 3. Although I think the colors should be adjusted to match the more yellowish 2.x style.

One thing I’m not sure about: Do all things have to look like panels (the Mint style)? Thinking of text panels I would love to see them on plain white.

Interesting stuff, everyone! Especially because I have been thinking of something like this coming from a different direction:

I have been using the documenter on some recent projects as it is a great way to make tips and how-tos accessible for my clients right where they need them. It works great for sections, editing and creating new entries – but I was missing the possibility to give some general information about using the backend. So far, my Symphony client projects are websites that probably won’t see a lot of editing until maybe a year in time, and by then, I suspect everyone using them will have forgotten where to find the information they want to edit. So what I would really want to provide is a basic hello, some general do’s and dont’s and basically any information that spans different sections and gives a broader scope than the section- and entry-specfic documenter can provide.

I can imagine the panel layout seen in the previous posts as a great way to display stats and figures in a widget style. However, as Nils already mentioned, I think it would make sense to have different kinds of display options as panels would seem rather blown up for the information I have in mind – short texts and step by step instructions.

Not sure where my dark dashboard (or in my case: landing page) vision came from, maybe from working with the documenter? I was thinking of evoking some kind of start screen feeling, as in getting ready before the curtain rises … not to reanimate the lightbox discussion though :)

When it’s so dark I think it helps to reduce the contrast between the form controls and the background, and also to make them smaller. It’s crazy to have the controls so wide when really their values are so short.

The only problem here is that when you give a select box a background or border you lose the OS’s default pretty styling leaving them looking a bit ugly.

I can imagine the panel layout seen in the previous posts as a great way to display stats and figures in a widget style

Yeah that’s where the original inspiration came from — the approach I’ve taken in very similar to the section layout with a two-third/one-third column and a set of “fields” (panels). There’s no reason why an individual panel can’t be styled in a different way though (they can be targeted by CSS). If you can find the time would you mind showing a mockup of how you saw the dashboard?

This idea is still very much evolving, so I’m happy to take it in a different direction and see where we end up!

Have added a couple of issues to the bug tracker.

The fact that no one else has picked up on these would suggest it could be something locally with me so happy to share any server info, though as far as I’m aware its pretty standard. ( Site is temporarily in a sub directory however? ).

This is one of those little but nice extensions that just seem to polish off the whole admin experience and would love to see it continued, would also echo the ability to set it as the default landing page would be a high priority feature (for me), appreciate its easier said than done. But Nick being a Demi-god and all, we ask and shall receive right? ;)

Good bugs! No idea how you got them though. Is there any chance you’d be able to package an ensemble of your build and email it to me? nick [at] nick-dunn.co.uk? I can’t recreate the bugs otherwise.

Could the dashboard be extended to become a dashboard per navigation group?

I have a fairly large/complex site coming up, and it to ease adding new content, I had the idea of making a pseudo dashboard per navigation group that would essentially just link down to other section indexes or entry creation forms.

At the moment I’m thinking of doing the original workaround method (Static Section with HTML Panel) so that I can still query the ‘dashboard section’ for data (eg. pinned entries for this ‘topic’), but if there’s a way to use the actual extension, I’m all ears.

Would it be possible to provide filter params for the Dashboard data sources?

Hello everyone, I’m new to symphony and I just installed an ensemble locally to experiment without destroying the live version.

But the installation obviously failed to create the dashboard table.

When trying to access the dashboard the following error occurs:

Table ‘ostsinnlivecopy.symdashboardpanels’ doesn’t exist An error occurred while attempting to execute the following query SELECT * FROM symdashboardpanels ORDER BY sort_order ASC

Does anyone have an idea what I did wrong?

I’m having trouble making this the default page when login. I think it could be because my site is is in a folder during development stage. (http://{url}.co.uk/{folder-name}/)

Is there a way I can fix this?