New, free possible add-on to try - Dashboard Maximizer
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Hi all,
Idly started fiddling around with this yesterday after spending quite alot of time using the File Manager and sifting through form results and getting frustrated by the lack of space for the data-heavy tables. Started fiddling with the CSS and the grid...and here we are! Packaged up (many thanks for 12345j for his excellent free Tinifier add-on in the marketplace...sort of gave me the idea I could do what I was after here quite easily, and I used the nuts and bolts of his package directory to start putting the pieces together here!) and attached - the 'Dashboard Maximizer' add-on! _C5.5 and above only!_ Download attachment to this post, drop into your packages directory and go for it! For beta/testing purposes here, best not to try this on Production sites yet!
In a nutshell, this gives you a switch in System & Settings to drop in a new stylesheet with some more fluid-friendly CSS for the dashboard + its grid. Nothing too fancy and doesn't aim to re-invent the wheel, restructure the dashboard (which I love!) or be 100% comprehensive and polished, but I think it goes some way to making some of the denser Dashboard panes/pages a little more user-friendly on bigger monitors/resolutions.
This isn't fully fluid as i've set a fixed width of 940px (don't expect any magical iPhone interface or anything!) because that would be beyond the scope of what I was trying to achieve here with minimal fuss & complexity -- this simply allow higher screen resolutions to have the pages/tables/grid flow (nearly) full-width. Makes a world of difference in the File Manager, Theme editor, form results pages, etc...
Tested this pretty thoroughly myself and ironed out some of the layout kinks i've spotted so everything looks pretty nice. Works best in Firefox, Chrome, IE9, but IE8 seemed to just about hold up too. Nothing fancy in the CSS...few max and min-widths and percentages for the '.spanX' grid tags. Nothing overwritten (and i've left the precisely sized News page alone) and should only affect Dashboard pages. Don't like it? Switch off via the System & Settings page!
Any comments welcome! Love for you guys to try it and to hear what you think. I absolutely love the new dashboard in 5.5, but certainly nice to have a painless way to 'maximize' the pages when i'm on a machine with a decent monitor! Again, c5.5 and above only need apply.
If you think it's worth it, i'll submit as free add-on to the marketplace. The CSS file it sticks in is pretty well commented if you want to see what's going on. Could minify and prob slim down a bit if this goes ahead to marketplace/production use...extra HTTP request + CSS isn't much though and, again, only appears on Dashboard pages which are already chock full of JS and CSS. This 1 extra file won't really make any difference.
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EDIT: Download removed. New version now in PRB.
Idly started fiddling around with this yesterday after spending quite alot of time using the File Manager and sifting through form results and getting frustrated by the lack of space for the data-heavy tables. Started fiddling with the CSS and the grid...and here we are! Packaged up (many thanks for 12345j for his excellent free Tinifier add-on in the marketplace...sort of gave me the idea I could do what I was after here quite easily, and I used the nuts and bolts of his package directory to start putting the pieces together here!) and attached - the 'Dashboard Maximizer' add-on! _C5.5 and above only!_ Download attachment to this post, drop into your packages directory and go for it! For beta/testing purposes here, best not to try this on Production sites yet!
In a nutshell, this gives you a switch in System & Settings to drop in a new stylesheet with some more fluid-friendly CSS for the dashboard + its grid. Nothing too fancy and doesn't aim to re-invent the wheel, restructure the dashboard (which I love!) or be 100% comprehensive and polished, but I think it goes some way to making some of the denser Dashboard panes/pages a little more user-friendly on bigger monitors/resolutions.
This isn't fully fluid as i've set a fixed width of 940px (don't expect any magical iPhone interface or anything!) because that would be beyond the scope of what I was trying to achieve here with minimal fuss & complexity -- this simply allow higher screen resolutions to have the pages/tables/grid flow (nearly) full-width. Makes a world of difference in the File Manager, Theme editor, form results pages, etc...
Tested this pretty thoroughly myself and ironed out some of the layout kinks i've spotted so everything looks pretty nice. Works best in Firefox, Chrome, IE9, but IE8 seemed to just about hold up too. Nothing fancy in the CSS...few max and min-widths and percentages for the '.spanX' grid tags. Nothing overwritten (and i've left the precisely sized News page alone) and should only affect Dashboard pages. Don't like it? Switch off via the System & Settings page!
Any comments welcome! Love for you guys to try it and to hear what you think. I absolutely love the new dashboard in 5.5, but certainly nice to have a painless way to 'maximize' the pages when i'm on a machine with a decent monitor! Again, c5.5 and above only need apply.
If you think it's worth it, i'll submit as free add-on to the marketplace. The CSS file it sticks in is pretty well commented if you want to see what's going on. Could minify and prob slim down a bit if this goes ahead to marketplace/production use...extra HTTP request + CSS isn't much though and, again, only appears on Dashboard pages which are already chock full of JS and CSS. This 1 extra file won't really make any difference.
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EDIT: Download removed. New version now in PRB.
This is really great. I could see this being really great for people with lots of user attributes to display in the grid, columns in the database, etc...
Thanks! Just a bit of fun initially, but probably could actually be of some practical use. Easy enough with a little CSS overriding, so thought worth trying to package up. Few little kinks to iron out with the specificity, but otherwise a pretty harmless add-on, about ready to package up. Will tidy the CSS a bit then have a go at PRB submission when I get a chance.
Could look at extending to make it switchable by page (maybe can follow the way the 'favourite' star works on each page?) but probably unnecessary...global switch is simple and the styles should do no harm. Min-width is fixed at 940px so, monitor no bigger than 1024x768, should have no impact.
Could look at extending to make it switchable by page (maybe can follow the way the 'favourite' star works on each page?) but probably unnecessary...global switch is simple and the styles should do no harm. Min-width is fixed at 940px so, monitor no bigger than 1024x768, should have no impact.
Just done a load more work on it to make it a little more flexible and useful...hopefully improve the performance and user experience a little too (not that performance would take too much of a hit from this in any case).
Submitted to marketplace, so pulled the old download off this forum post.
Thanks for the feedback guys! See how it does in PRB.
Submitted to marketplace, so pulled the old download off this forum post.
Thanks for the feedback guys! See how it does in PRB.
