→ back to New Admin Area Project
→ by moraes, posted earlier on the forum.
After a while researching, reading and testing a lot of code for Nucleus Boron, I felt I was terribly frozen in a kind of 'analysis crisis'. Then I looked back at Nucleus, which has a rock solid code but is a bit disorganized and ugly in some aspects… and started to think about how to make a new admin area using the current code base. These are some thoughts evolved since then:
The admin area in Nucleus 3.22 is very difficult to change because database access,
PHP and
HTML are all mixed in pratically one single file. We need to make it:
more flexible
more reusable
better to maintain
easier to make layout changes
perhaps support a theming system
To reach the point when we can start implementing new admin area features, usability and design, first we need to pass by a (boring!) ADMIN.php clean up and analysis, moving things to their right places. This is the ADMIN.php Refactoring Project.
We need to organize our plan for a new admin area. While working on ADMIN.php I felt the need of a list with all the actions performed inside it, to compare and analyse them, and later to test them. The list is done inside ADMIN.php itself, so the work is to get it and organize it to better understand the admin area needs (and ask ourselves things like: “don't we need a pager class? a list class? a form processing class?”).
Once the
PHP code is more or less organized, or better, during this work, we need to list all the necessary screens (layouts) to build the new admin area, so other code needs will appear and also the usability & design team can start working on the layout.
This is just the start of a plan. Unless you think this is not a reasonable start, we already have work for everybody that want to contribute, so please choose a task and start it, or suggest new ones. Your contribution is needed. Otherwise, help improving the plan!
