Category Archives: Dev Diary

Dev Diary: Admin Panel Changes

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Greetings and welcome back to the Dev Diary!

Last time around Emil was kind enough to walk the community through Oxwall’s general plans for the year (check it out if you need a refresher), and of course everyone is now clamoring the details. Well, that’s what Dev Diary is for, so let’s get right down to business. Today we’ll take a look at the Admin Panel and what we’ve been doing to it lately.

Navigation

One of the things that bothered us for a while in regards to the current Admin Panel is rather obvious – a lot of space is used irrationally, including –

  • notifications cluttering up the top of every page;
  • a multi-level horizontal menu absorbing quite an area;
  • gradual accumulation of system settings (sometimes found in unexpected or not obvious places).

Apart from the visual aesthetics problem, the aforementioned issues can potentially disorient you or negatively impact your performance.

Oxwall Navigation

To fix that and optimize your work we decided to create a more user-friendly environment right in the heart of your site. To do so we’ll introduce a new vertical menu, and also restructure the settings. This allowed us to move all notification to the console and bunch them up under a single icon. Now you can access all available updates or necessary system settings at any moment on any page.

Oxwall NavigationDashboard

It’s been our goal for a while now to give all admins some sort of work areas. Think individual space to shape it up to your liking, where you can manage all the necessary site information in the most accessible form.

That idea was implemented as Admin Dashboard – a widget page with purpose-built stat tools like User Statistics (Registrations, Online), Content Statistics, Moderation Tools, etc. Most of the data is supplemented with accompanying graphs for your convenience. Meanwhile, third-party developers will be welcome to introduce their own Admin Dashboard widgets.

Oxwall DashboardResponsive

Finally, the next ambitious step we took was the adptation of the current Admin Panel for the work on tablets. Without giving too much away, we can reveal that this segment is indeed important for us, and we are already hard at work on a brand new responsive theme. That, however, is a topic for an entirely new Dev Diary post.

Subscribe to our social media feeds and never miss an announcement. See you next time!

 

Dev Diary, April 30, 2014

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Here we are again with our Dev Diary series. This time we want to let you know about the upcoming changes in internal communication tools in Oxwall.

As you know, there are two plugins now, Mailbox and Chat. They are independent, so you can only communicate in real-time chat or using mailbox (that mimicks email). There are several important issues with that though, namely:

  • Messaging communication keeps getting transformed. There’s a reason why the border between email and instant messaging blurred so much, and we are not fully content with any one of these.
  • People don’t necessarily want to remember where the talk happened. It’s just convenient to have everything in one place with ability to search.
  • Sometimes it’s really much more convenient to keep your chat going in a focused, standard page interface, than to type and read in that small chat window; or to have back-and-forth email followup’s in bite-sized messages.

Fundamentally, while a social website is a complex system, sending a message is a trivial, casual, frequent operation. It means, there have to be different ways to send, receive, and respond to messages, all suitable for context and task at hand.

But then, communication is different. While casual messaging is sufficient for some websites, other may really benefit from a more formal, email-style approach. Since Oxwall websites are used for different purposes, we have to support both paradigms and make them work nicely together, if required.

With all this in mind, we decided to do the following:
– Make a unified Messages plugin that will incorporate functionality of both Mailbox and Chat plugins;
– Allow to enable either of those, or both at once;
– Have chats and “emails” in one interface with search (retaining chat and contact list windows, of course);
– Provide granular (if excessive) permission settings for every action in mailbox and chat.

Screenshot from 2014-04-30 17:30:54

The new Messages plugin will be available as the successor of the two current plugins with the platform 1.6.1 release. We hope communication in Oxwall will become much more efficient now. And of course, we are ready to iterate on your feedback.

Thank you for being such a fantastic community!

Dev Diary, February 6, 2014

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We know that as a rule our posts tend to be surprise announcements of releases, despite the fact that many community members are keen on learning what us, Oxwall guys, are actually up to in the times between updates. Well, recently we’ve come to think that it’s a pretty good idea to let you in on all the fun we have inside, namely, our work process and development progress. Ready? Here we go.

We understand that there are still many elements within Oxwall software that can be improved. Let’s take a look at one such area, which will likely make it to the next iteration – the functionality extension of user roles and account types.

The problem here is the lack of option for admins to assign an individual user role per individual account type during new member registration. At the moment all new site members get the same user role, unless admins set said roles manually, which significantly complicates their work on community-driven sites. Say, you have a literature-driven community with writers and readers. These roles are obviously different for members, as writers write posts, while readers can comment or grade them. Putting an option in place for admins to assign individual user roles during registration will make their lives much easier.

Now, there are also a couple of related issues with account types. The interface is somewhat difficult to grasp, and there is also the fact that one question can be assigned per one account type only. Both of these will be tackled, and in the result the interface will become significantly more user-friendly, while single profile questions will be allowed to be assigned per multiple account types simultaneously.
Hopefully this gives you a bit of insight on the things that keep us occupied. There’s a lot of stuff we have to share with you, so keep reading our blog for more info on our adventures in development.

Love,
Oxwall Team.