Recently I blogged about LooseCoupling a doctrine extension to type-independently relate records with eachother without firing more queries than necessary.

Soon after I wrote a sort of concept on how to dynamically compose a homepage using a symfony admin module.

And now I released my first steps into the open.

gjPositionsPlugin will hopefully become a powerful tool to allow users of your backend application to manually compose a homepage and its contents.

What is it?

The idea is quite simple. A homepage has many design elements which in turn have many content elements which again could be anything (see LooseCoupling).

These are the main user stories.

• The user is able to add design elements (slideshow, top teaser, etc..) onto the page
• The user is able to reorder the design elements on the page
• The user is able to drag contents (article, image, whatever..) onto design elements

The plugin is of course not finished yet and far from usable!

What’s up?

For now I have concentrated on the “design element to page” bit which is not yet perfect but generally works.

A great help for this has been a blogpost by Nacho Martín about Dynamic embedded forms in symfony. Although it’s almost one year old it is still remarkable accurate.

So the current features of the gjPageAdmin module are.

• You can dynamically add new design elements to a page by dragging them from the source list onto the page.
• The page and all its new and reordered relations to design elements will be correctly saved.

What’s next?

Next I will focus on the design elements as they so far are nothing more than names that can be dragged and dropped. They need to be real partials which can be added according to your needs.

Should you be tempted to play around with this please go on. Feedback and contributions are much appreciated!

architecture · Doctrine · gjPositionsPlugin · Open Source · Plugin · symfony

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