Manager Template Engine (MTE)

1,732 Posts

xwisdom Reply #1, 20 years, 10 months ago

Here’s what I propose for the new manager templating system:

Template path:

manager/themes/{name}
manager/themes/{name}/images
manager/themes/{name}/login.php - login page
manager/themes/{name}/layout.php - master page layout
manager/themes/{name}/{other_manager_pages}.php - action page templates
manager/themes/{name}/style.css

example of layout.php

<?php 
	$info			= array();
	$info['name'] 	= 'BlueWater';
	$info['date'] 	= '09-Nov-2005';
	$info['author']	= 'modxer';
?>
<html>
<head>
<style>
	@import([+themepath+]/style.css);
</style>
<script src="[+themepath+]/setfooter.js"></script>
</head>
<body>
<div id="cms_container">
    <div id="cms_header">[+header+]</div>
    <div id="cms_menu">[+menu+]</div>
    <div id="cms_sidebar">[+panels+]</div>
    <div id="cms_content">[+content+]</div>
    <div id="cms_footer">[+footer+]</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>

The template engine should be able to process Placeholders and Plugins

example of {other_manager_pages}.php

<div class="cms_buttons">[+save+] [+delete+] [+cancel+]</div>
<div class="cms_form">
	<form action="index.php?a=[+action+]">
		[+trig:OnFormPreRender+]
		User name:<input name="name" type="text" value="[+username+]" />
		<input name="send" type="submit" value="[+lang:submit+]" />
		[+trig:OnFormRender+]
	</form>
</div>

Note the new placeholder pre-processors [+lang:{language-name}+] and [+trig:{event-name}+]

We could also do something like [+site:email_address+]

xWisdom
www.xwisdomhtml.com
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom:
MODx Co-Founder - Create and do more with less.

MODX Staff
12,272 Posts

Ryan Thrash Reply #2, 20 years, 10 months ago

Now that looks great Raymond!

In the other page example above, can you explain the preprocessors a little and how they work?

Ryan Thrash, MODX Co-Founder
Follow me on Twitter at @rthrash or catch my occasional unofficial thoughts at thrash.me

680 Posts

aNoble Reply #3, 20 years, 10 months ago

Looks good to me too. My one concern is how using a lot of snippets/chunks/plugins in the manager will affect the frontend performance and bog down the manager UI for snippet/chunk/plugin editing. I think we need to to do some testing for performance reasons and maybe we need to have a way to hide manager snippets/plugins/etc to the common user, maybe based on permissions.

Adam Crownoble: obleDesign.com | [email protected] | [email protected] (Google Talk)

MODX Staff
12,272 Posts

Ryan Thrash Reply #4, 20 years, 10 months ago

Ahhh... how Shakesperian... a snippet within a snippet!

Ryan Thrash, MODX Co-Founder
Follow me on Twitter at @rthrash or catch my occasional unofficial thoughts at thrash.me

1,732 Posts

xwisdom Reply #5, 20 years, 10 months ago

Quote from: rthrash at Nov 09, 2005, 06:40 AM

Now that looks great Raymond!

In the other page example above, can you explain the preprocessors a little and how they work?

Ok maybe preprocessor was not the right word to use but I could not come up with anything else.

The general idea here is that these special placeholders such as [+lang:+] will be be parsed as normal placeholders would but they would return the value from some predefined process.

For example, the [+lang:{name}+] placeholder will return the language for the given {name}.

When the parser encounters the [+lang:login_message+] placeholder it will look up the language key (or name) "login_message" and then return the following to replace the placeholder:

Please enter your login credentials to start your Manager session. Your username and password are case-sensitive, so please enter them carefully!

When the parser sees the [+site:email_address+] it would then lookup the site settings "email_address" and return that value.

Whenever it encounters the [+trig:OnFormPrerender+] placholder it will trigger the event "OnFormPrerender" and return the output from the event.

What do you think?

xWisdom
www.xwisdomhtml.com
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom:
MODx Co-Founder - Create and do more with less.

MODX Staff
12,272 Posts

Ryan Thrash Reply #6, 20 years, 10 months ago

That sounds great to me. Something I’d really like to address is the internationalization and extending it to the front-end too. I do recall that this is one of the things Travis did have working using the syntax of %%(word/phrase goes here)%% or something like that, anyway. It was all done using i18n (or whatever that is) and some sorta mojo there. This is where some of the guys from France and the Netherlands could really help out I’m sure.

And we should probably prepare for the inevitable "in the database" vs the "on the filesystem" debate here... which if you think about it also applies to many other things we’re doing! wink

Ryan Thrash, MODX Co-Founder
Follow me on Twitter at @rthrash or catch my occasional unofficial thoughts at thrash.me

MODX Staff
12,272 Posts

Ryan Thrash Reply #7, 20 years, 10 months ago

Actually now that I think about it also, I’m in favor of making all the actions in the template directories to be overrides, and only used if they are present. I’m confident we can build a default set with enough "hooks" in them to satisfy most developers’ needs. They can still change the layout and look via CSS quite easily.

Ryan Thrash, MODX Co-Founder
Follow me on Twitter at @rthrash or catch my occasional unofficial thoughts at thrash.me

1,732 Posts

xwisdom Reply #8, 20 years, 10 months ago

Quote from: aNoble at Nov 09, 2005, 07:16 AM

Looks good to me too. My one concern is how using a lot of snippets/chunks/plugins in the manager will affect the frontend performance and bog down the manager UI for snippet/chunk/plugin editing. I think we need to to do some testing for performance reasons and maybe we need to have a way to hide manager snippets/plugins/etc to the common user, maybe based on permissions.

Ok,

The design of the parser will also be changed a bit to handle hundreds of plugins. We would very well allow some plugins to only execute from withing the manager or visa versa. But that’s something we will have to agree to.

The next thing is that we could tag (or categorize) manager plugins within some built-in tags so has to group those built-in plugins.

IMO I don’t think the snippets will slow down the manager any more than they would a website. Template designers just have to make sure that they don’t over do things. The other thing is that the manager’s UI will not have any effect on the performance of the frontpage.

xWisdom
www.xwisdomhtml.com
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom:
MODx Co-Founder - Create and do more with less.

MODX Staff
12,272 Posts

Ryan Thrash Reply #9, 20 years, 10 months ago

Victor has some insights on general design/coding patterns for handling plugins which I hope he’ll contribute here.

Ryan Thrash, MODX Co-Founder
Follow me on Twitter at @rthrash or catch my occasional unofficial thoughts at thrash.me

680 Posts

aNoble Reply #10, 20 years, 10 months ago

This all sounds great to me! I love the placeholders idea.

Do you think we should implement some sort of caching in the manager? I think it would be very helpful for the language placeholders, especially.

Adam Crownoble: obleDesign.com | [email protected] | [email protected] (Google Talk)