adva cms

Out now: adva-cms 0.2.0: The usability release!

posted by Marko Seppä on April 28, 2009 14:55

Over the past month, our goal was to improve the usability of the adva-cms backend interface and to clean up our HTML and CSS codebase. We created a new admin layout from scratch and now it looks prettier than ever (at least we like to think so)!

This release also introduces the menu and table builders for developers which helped us to clean up the view code and to cut out many partials.

Now we are happy to deliver you a cleaner, clearer and more usable adva-cms today! Enjoy!

Whats new in 0.2.0?

Completely reworked backend interface.
Improves the usability of adva-cms (and also it looks good)!
Increased usability!
We tried to remove unnecessary complexity of the interface by unifying the main views and sidebars. We also added breadcrumbs and menu highlighting to help backend users with the navigation.
Builders to help developers create clean HTML more easily.
Added a menu builder with active tab highlighting and breadcrumb functionality. This will also help you to build menus for frontend more easily.

Added a table builder to unify the table structures all around the adva-cms. This addition makes the view code for cleaner and more elegant and also removes unnecessary looping partials!
has_filter plugin
The awesome new has_filter plugin helps you filter your sites' content with elegance and simplicity.
Switched from Prototype to jQuery.
We replaced all the Prototype code with jQuery.

New jQuery code on assets and assets_plugin and also the QUnit for unit testing jQuery contributed by Luca Guidi.

Plans for the future of adva-cms

Revisiting RBAC
We currently have an RBAC (role-based access control) implementation but there is not yet any interface to use it. We also need to revisit it to support user groups etc. We hope to implement these during the forthcoming releases.
Revisiting i18n keys
We want to revisit the i18n keys, meaning cleaning them up and structuring them better. Also we want to implement some tools to help you do translation work.

The default frontend layout needs some love. We hope to do this in forthcoming adva-cms releases, although it is not at the top of our priority list. We know we have to improve it. If you cannot wait, then this is a good chance for you to contribute! Just talk to us in our IRC channel or on the mailing list.