My Panel Wishlist

[BenSeitz]

After commenting on a GitHub Issue about editing blueprints within the panel, I thought quite a bit about the future of the kirby panel. Here are some of these thoughts:

First of all: I love the panel for its minimalism and I would hate to see it becoming as cluttered as the wordpress/typo3/contao/joomla/… backend. But there are still 3 major field of improvement as far as I can see.

1. Usability
It’s about the naming of some buttons, tuning the search function, adding small stuff. @bastianallgeier did add quite a few things that improve usability in the last few days. (Toggle Button for visible/invisible, switch off file name sanitization, …) These are important! They make you want to use the panel. And thats important for us and our clients. You could improve hundreds of things if you look close enough. But fixing a view with every minor update is the best way in my opinion.

2. Adding Functionality
Maybe kirby panel is a bit too minimalistic. Some functions are desperately needed by some of us. A lot of GitHub Issus regarding missing features. Like

• An image field (beside dynamic select and checkboxes)
• Global files for site (which got added last thursday)
• Custom fields for users (depending on the user role)

There a lot of other wishes and I hope the new forum evolves into a platform where we can collect and discuss ideas

3. Customizability
For one you can style your panel with a custom css and for another thing, you can extend the panel!
Right now with custom blueprint fields, but there will be custom hooks, dashboard widgets and even bigger panel plugins. (No promise, just what I read on GitHub)
I personally think, thats the most important thing for kirbys future. Keep the core clean, but make it easy to extend. The possibilities are endless:

• a contact widget for your clients if they need help
• embedding a database
• use a hook to post a newly added article on a social media platform via an api
• or even something as big as a kirby shop plugin!

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What do you think? Where do you see the future of the panel?

Cheers,
Ben

[chrisburton]

I’ve mentioned this before so this is what I’d like to see:

• A feature I would like is managing users. It would be nice to have features such as banning/suspending a user, updating, upgrading, etc., all within the panel.

• Although not specifically a Panel feature, I’d like to see Kirby move on to using Opauth for its native auth. Opauth gives you the ease of integrating an array of providers making it easier for those who don’t have Twitter or Github or Facebook, etc.

[walkerbox]

I agree that customisation would be a wonderful addition - I have just completed a site for a client where I’ve had to fork the panel to add a new controller/view and to stop emails being required for users.

[texnixe]

I think the important thing about adding features and customizations is to make them easy to add if needed and not try to make Kirby an “Eierlegende Wollmilchsau” (German expression “egg-laying wool-milk-sow”) or jack of all trades, thus becoming more and more complicated to use. Personally, I came to use Kirby because I was fed up with the bloat of CMSes like Joomla, Wordpress and the likes.

As regards things on the wishlist, here are some:

• something like hierarchic fields, so that dependent fields are only visible if parent is selected/true
• more user roles (I like the fine-grained ACL of Doku-Wiki)
• easier handling of structured field data
• possibilty to change template from panel while preserving data

[BenSeitz]

Aaaaaaaand since everyone has very specific wishes, it’s so important to make kirby panel very easily extendable. Otherwise it will get too complicated and cluttered…

[Malvese]

and not try to make Kirby an “Eierlegende Wollmilchsau” (German expression “egg-laying wool-milk-sow”) or jack of all trades, thus becoming more and more complicated to use.

I second that. I’m not a proper developer but a designer/front end guy, and I fear complexity much more than clutter. I built many sites with Drupal during the last decade, and it got a lot more complex, with way too many levels of abstraction. Kirby is very refreshing in that regard.

What I’d like to see for the panel is better usability for editors. It is not bad right now, but some basic things are not as obvious as I’d like: “what/where is this page I’m currently editing?”, “how do I go ‘back’ (to the parent page)?”.
The breadcrumb feels weird to me, with “Dashboard” as the first level. The pages hierarchy is very important in Kirby, but is not presented in a clear way.

Usability is hard though, it takes time to discover new/better ways, it needs to be coded, it needs user testing…

[gerritvanaaken]

I would want the panel to prevent me from deleting page content by clicking on the image editing area.

Now, once you’re heading to image editing, you leave the page editing area and all your page content changes are lost.

[distantnative]

@gerritvanaaken

I would want the panel to prevent me from deleting page content by clicking on the image editing area.

Not only editing, but uploading a new image as well. Prob my most common mistake atm when using the panel

[Ti_Gr]

I badly want to save my panel-changes by cmd + s

[Luke]

I can’t even begin to count the number of times I hit CMD+S while working in Kirby… only get get frustrated when it tries to download the page to my hard drive.

[plaidpowered]

My #1 request for the Panel is having event hooks and content filters available to developers. (Similar to Wordpress’s actions/filters). I read on the GitHub Issues page that Sebastian is planning this for 2.1? I really hope that happens. Then I could extend the functionality of the Panel through plugins to do just about anything.

[thguenther]

Add this to /panel/assets/js/app.js

$(document).ready(function(){
   $(document).keydown(function(e) {
       if ((e.which == '115' || e.which == '83' ) && (e.ctrlKey || e.metaKey))
       {
           e.preventDefault();
           
           $("input[title='meta+enter']").click();
           
           return false;
       }
       return true;
   });
});

[Luke]

@thguenther

Add this to /panel/assets/app.js

I didn’t have that app.js file in my panel assets, but when added to /panel/assets/panel.js it works. Thanks a lot!

[DieserJonas]

Same here. I have hit “CMD+S” on the panel hundreds of times while switching back and forth between the panel and my code editor.

@bastianallgeier We need that CMD+S shortcut!

[thguenther]

Sorry, I’ve edited my original post.

[bastianallgeier]

Ok, ok, message received I will try to implement CMD+S asap. I’m also aware of the problems with losing content when opening the upload. I will try to fix that as well.

Keep the wishes coming! I cannot always promise to implement things soon or at all, but it’s definitely a great way for me to set priorities more according to what you need.

[jakobploens]

When inserting lots of contents by copying from e.g. PDFs or word documents (well, clients…) it would be great to have something like an optional filter method to “sanitize” the copied text to markdown – especially when there are clusters which are repeating the whole time, this could save couple of minutes/hours… (e.g. exchange strange list symbols, tabs etc. with "- ").

[bastianallgeier]

Sounds great, but would be super complicated to implement.

[jakobploens]

Yep… therefore an optional, maybe even experimental thing?

Or just a direct method of searching & replacing?

[yollaradi]

@plaidpowered

My #1 request for the Panel is having event hooks and content filters available to developers.

Same here.
Waiting desperately for an on save hook…