The existing hardcoded admin visibility and access can be controlled through the role based security model.
This offers the most minimal control of the custom admin tabs. Similar permission based visibility could easily be accomplished with relevant attributes in the XML file.
The admin area can be supplemented by custom admin tabs. v2.2 will see the introduction of the ability to override the "My FarCry" page and the admin CSS. That should be enough to see most anybody through.
Although the above additions are great, why not give developers more control? I use Farcry as a generic and extensible framework, not just as a CMS. Currently there is no simple way to do something such as adding another link to the Reporting->Statistics sub tab or changing the 'defaultpage' for any core tab.
FarCry admin is something that has evolved somewhat erractically. And cleaning it up would be nice. We've often discussed the introduction of an entirely XML driven tab interface. But at the moment there is no real driver for this. It's a task that is going to introduce a lot of instability into the code base with not a great deal to gain. So although it remains a goal -- it's realistically a fair-ways off.
"An entirely XML driven tab interface" is not too hard to accomplish. It just means generating what you currently have using an XML file instead of the current hard coded solution -- an extension and growth of the current implementation of custom admin tabs.
It shouldn't need to break any existing code or introduce any instabilities. It can generate the same HTML (using the current custom tags), link to permissions and even take the same URL parameters (section,parenttab,subtab,defaultpage).
It would provide more granule control for projects over the admin interface layout allowing each project to completely customise the admin interface and would clean up and generalise the current code base (which means _greater_ stability, not less stability). It could also provide a hook-in point for plugins/projects to programatically change the behaviour of the admin interface tabs.
Doesn't this seem like the natural step forward for this facet of the Farcry CMS/Framework?
-- tim lucas
http://www.toolmantim.com
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MXDU2004 + Macromedia DevCon AsiaPac + Sydney, Australia http://www.mxdu.com/ + 24-25 February, 2004
