What are the options for custom panel views and routes?

The CMS Questions
1

Use case: manage content that doesn’t fit into the flat file structure of the kirby.
I’m working on a website that presents it’s visitors a catalog of ~25000 items. Aside those, there are few “informational” pages which of course are elegantly managed through kirby panel. Saving those items as “Pages” isn’t really practical (just think about the pages sidebar).

Now I’d like to extend the panel in a way that keeps the Kirby Look and Feel ™. ALso because I can use Kirby for all the “annoying” tasks like authentication, admin CSS, maybe even form generation, validation and data collection, etc.

As far as I know there are the following methods of extending kirby panel:

  • Dashboard widgets (documented, no custom route [right?])
  • Custom fields (documented, with undocumented custom routes [see structure field])
  • Custom routes (undocumented, seems fragile [see this], what about authentication etc?)

I would really really really like to see some documentation on what is possible and how. Like a tutorial showing us how to assemble a panel view, complete with sidebar, topbar, notifications, forms etc.
Am I really the only one?

2

You can move (and filter) the subpage section from the sidebar to the main panel with the Subpagelist field. In combination with Kirby Tabs you may be able to handle a larger amount of subpages.

3

I would love to see this as well! I think the only reason why this features haven’t made it into the docs yet is that the team is still busy documenting the core features :wink:

4

I could try to “tag” them, let’s say I invent 25 tags…
While I wouldn’t really be comfortable thinking about PHP looping over 25000 (and growing) files checking for a label, it could still work with some clever caching, but then it would still present me a paginated list of 1000 items. Good luck finding the right one ;).
I’d prefer being able to hook up my elastic search API and let the user search his items in a more sophisticated way.

I’m not saying Kirby lacks something… I’m not looking for a “elastic search binding for Kirby”…
Luckily Kirby isn’t a CMS that tries to do everything, while ending up with doing everything bad. For me, the appeal of Kirby is it’s flexibility to be extended and customized, but this needs some more documentation imho.