New layout

[sebersole]

After much discussion with Charles earlier today, a couple of notes:

1) In a little bit, I will be checking in a new layout to the overall admin console. The key changes:
a) layout will no longer be css/div-based. it will be table based. the biggest reason for this was that because of the div offsets forced by the css(to get placement) there was a large possibility of stuff rendering "off screen".
b) keeping in mind that the long term goal is a portal based console, the new layout applies portal-like chromes upon the individual "portlets". the modules, themselves don't have to do anything here; the layout handles it.
c) some better style/color choices.

another thing to consider is the left navigation content. two things in particular:
1) currently it is all hard-coded. while that's currently fine as we only have 4 modules, this will become "difficult" when we have a full compliment (plus its just not very extensible).
2) again considering the long term portal objective, typically portal navigation actions render the given portlet's VIEW. Even in the struts stuff, this makes a lot of sense as we can keep the left nav clean. again, there is currently only 4 modules so its not that big of a deal yet. equated to the current struts setup, I think we should strive for the following:
a) each module should define a "/index.html" action mapping (the servlet is configured to only accept "*.html", or I'd say make this "/")
b) each module will have one link in the left nav (preferably dynamically built) which will point to its "/index.html" action mapping.

[aveitas]

Hi Steve,

Is the goal then to have all modules port to this new layout? Right now the web services module uses the TableTag library for much of its layout etc.

Looking for some general direction here, should I start porting to this new scheme?

Thanks,

Al

[ccrouch]

"aveitas" wrote:

Is the goal then to have all modules port to this new layout? Right now the web services module uses the TableTag library for much of its layout etc.

Yes the goal is to have all modules fit into this new layout. It is my understanding however that the change Steve made should not overly impact the individual modules. It was really aimed at providing a more "portal-like" framework for the modules to be rendered into. One thing still left on Steve's plate is to bring back the "nice", :-), looking tabs that were available in each portlet.

With respect to using TableTag and more generally the displaytag.jar, I was hoping that since they seem to rely heavily on CSS for their presentation that it should be possible, via tweaking the stylesheets, to come up with a look and feel for the WebServices module which matches the very simplified look of the other portlets. Do you think that this is feasible? At some stage I would like to make sure all modules are using common CSS classes so that we can hopefully get towards the more sophisticated look and feel achievable with displaytags.

In the future I could certainly imagine some of the other modules converting to using DisplayTags for rendering, but I want them to be able to do that on a case by case basis, rather than updating them all at once.