What are components in Revolution?

I have been playing with Revolution Alpha3, very nice leap from the previous release I tested, I am impressed. Everything seems to be working very well, the install was very smooth.

There is a menu item Components that is empty, and I can’t seem to figure out what it is all about. So I ask..What is a Component and why is my menu empty?

Quote from: dev_cw at Jul 30, 2008, 06:44 PM

I have been playing with Revolution Alpha3, very nice leap from the previous release I tested, I am impressed. Everything seems to be working very well, the install was very smooth.

There is a menu item Components that is empty, and I can’t seem to figure out what it is all about. So I ask..What is a Component and why is my menu empty?

A component is a 3rd party application, such as Ditto, TinyMCE, etc. They can be either one Element (such as one snippet) or a collection of different elements and resources.

The idea is that this would be the menu that 3rd party developers would insert their menu links (modMenu objects) to their custom manager pages (modAction objects), keeping the top bar from getting cluttered with 300 different top-level menus.

It’s definitely open to feedback.

The idea is that this would be the menu that 3rd party developers would insert their menu links (modMenu objects) to their custom manager pages (modAction objects), keeping the top bar from getting cluttered with 300 different top-level menus.

That sounds good. I wont ask about the modAction and modMenu objects yet 

In the Action > Top Menu panel the Components shows up as a folder with no name so I guess it gets its name from somewhere else? Also I was not able to find an "Add New Top Menu Item" function. If there could be a way to identify which items have contextual menus and which don’t would be nice (not sure if it is possible, maybe a slightly different icon for those with menu). I found myself right-clicking all over the place looking for a menu.

Would be nice to be able to deactivate menu items without deleting them.

On the topic of the Top Menu...sweet! That is great that you can edit the menu right there and even assign actions or handlers. 

Quote from: dev_cw at Jul 30, 2008, 07:49 PM

The idea is that this would be the menu that 3rd party developers would insert their menu links (modMenu objects) to their custom manager pages (modAction objects), keeping the top bar from getting cluttered with 300 different top-level menus.

That sounds good. I wont ask about the modAction and modMenu objects yet

Some of my tutorials describe this pretty in-depth.

In the Action > Top Menu panel the Components shows up as a folder with no name so I guess it gets its name from somewhere else?

It’s a bug in alpha-3, a missing lexicon string. The SVN has this fixed.

Also I was not able to find an "Add New Top Menu Item" function. If there could be a way to identify which items have contextual menus and which don’t would be nice (not sure if it is possible, maybe a slightly different icon for those with menu). I found myself right-clicking all over the place looking for a menu.

Yeah, to add a new Top Menu, you have to click on a top menu item, and change its parent to No Action. This is a ’bug’ (sort of) that needs to be fixed for the next alpha release.

Would be nice to be able to deactivate menu items without deleting them.

Point taken. We’ll look into it. Can you file a JIRA ticket?

On the topic of the Top Menu...sweet! That is great that you can edit the menu right there and even assign actions or handlers.

Yep, that was the idea. It’ll allow complete customization of the top menu.