MODX Manager - can we make improvements?

Quote from: pdincubus at Sep 24, 2013, 05:13 AM

I'm mostly front end, so stick mainly with CSS/HTML/jQuery, but the Angular site on a quick scan seems to be much cleaner?

There is no reason at all why MODx couldn't be used to build its own Manager interface, using whatever library you wanted. See NewsPublisher for an example. As I said before, it's all just forms and database access.

Quote from: sottwell at Sep 24, 2013, 05:18 AM

It would require a whole new Manager. The existing Manager is built on an extended, customized version of ExtJs. See /manager/assets/modext for the files. This way we can have widgets like modx.panel.chunk.js and modx.grid.resource.active.js for fine control over the Manager interface. Theoretically it's great, but in practice it doesn't live up to expectations. Giving up the KISS principle for bells and whistles isn't usually a very good idea. I suspect, however, that a good part of the bottleneck is the adding of Smarty to the mix. I didn't like Smarty 10 years ago, and I don't like it any better now.

So essentially we are stuck with the current generation of EXTjs because it's so deeply modified and embedded into the manager? What are the chances of rewriting the manager to bring it up to speed (unintentional pun!) for, say v3.0? I understand Smarty is not very fast and not particularly liked - is this as big a job to throw out and replace as EXTjs?

I would love to help contribute in any way I can to a newer, faster, (more easily themeable?!) manager!

Quote from: sottwell at Sep 24, 2013, 05:22 AM

As I said before, it's all just forms and database access.

I think Susan has nailed it right there. If you want to rewrite the manager, you need to think of the Manager interface as your "site" with the requirement of using the modx table structure. As a really easy way of starting off, install MODX in location 1. Then install MODX in location 2. Let's say location 1 is the fake site you want to build for a real web site and location 2 is the site for the manager. Location 2 would have its own manager which would help you build the new site which does CRUD operations using the modx_ tables from location 1. Manager-ception!

Replacing Smarty would be a lot less troublesome than replacing ExtJS probably, as there's not that many actual smarty templates being parsed that contain more than a single line of code (typically, an empty div).

If you wanted to generate your own Manager pages using ordinary MODx resources, you could have them set to not show in the tree, and assign them to a group attached to a user group whose only purpose is to manage the Manager pages. No other user groups would be attached to the resource group, so nobody else would ever see them to mess with them. Then your manager resource user could hack away at the Manager all he liked. A MIGXdb CMP might be a good Manager manager interface.

Quote from: pdincubus at Sep 24, 2013, 05:22 AM

Quote from: sottwell at Sep 24, 2013, 05:18 AM

It would require a whole new Manager. The existing Manager is built on an extended, customized version of ExtJs. See /manager/assets/modext for the files. This way we can have widgets like modx.panel.chunk.js and modx.grid.resource.active.js for fine control over the Manager interface. Theoretically it's great, but in practice it doesn't live up to expectations. Giving up the KISS principle for bells and whistles isn't usually a very good idea. I suspect, however, that a good part of the bottleneck is the adding of Smarty to the mix. I didn't like Smarty 10 years ago, and I don't like it any better now.

So essentially we are stuck with the current generation of EXTjs because it's so deeply modified and embedded into the manager? What are the chances of rewriting the manager to bring it up to speed (unintentional pun!) for, say v3.0? I understand Smarty is not very fast and not particularly liked - is this as big a job to throw out and replace as EXTjs?

I would love to help contribute in any way I can to a newer, faster, (more easily themeable?!) manager!

Yes we currently stuck with ExtJS, although nothing stopping you from using plain html and css when creating Custom Manager Pages. Also ExtJS will be removed for 3.0, what will it be replaced by, that is still undecided. But whatever it will be, will be much easier to work with and yes will be themeable, just as the current manager is themeable (nothing stopping you from changing the look and feel, except a few grey hair while learning ExtJS).

Just a further thing I've been thinking about - when editing snippets, chunks, etc through the manager it's really frustrating how "letterboxy" the editor area is. Can anyone help me fix this?

I think the RTE is initiated here:

/manager/controllers/default/element/ and then in any of: chunk, snippet, plugin, template, tv etc

In the chunk.class.php file on line 83 there is: public function loadRte() {

but I'm not sure if this is where any of the editor settings can be set?

Would this need to be fixed through the codemirror/ace rte package or can this be set as a global default in the manager?

What do you mean by "letterboxy"?

Quote from: sottwell at Sep 30, 2013, 03:57 AM

What do you mean by "letterboxy"?

Haha apologies, it was the best I could come up with. What I mean is that it's a very wide editor and way way way too short!
It needs to probably be two or three times taller for it to feel comfortable to edit in.

After a lot of digging around, I forked CodeMirror and spotted a height being set in one of the CSS files in assets/components. Submitted pull request https://github.com/splittingred/CodeMirror/pull/21