So if you're adventurous, you can take a look at the new control panel (link will be below) and see what direction I'm taking the control panel. I wouldn't suggest it for daily use yet - there are still a lot of bugs left and a few features that haven't been fully implemented (hit logging / tagboards), and the adding entry is still incomplete (no pinging, no xposting, no "saving" of settings).

This control panel upgrade, nearly a year in the making (this is actually the third private iteration of the control panel, I scrapped two rewrites before) is only a small step for me. The biggest goal I was aiming for is to simplify the UI and to make management of your content easier - almost every view now has checkboxes so you can delete content much faster.

Here is some new features in the control panel (note that certain features have not been updated on your www.tabulas.com/~site/ views like the gallery!):

  1. Nested gallery albums (a few months in the making)
  2. Ability to tag your links and an easy bookmarklet so adding links to your Tabulas account is easy (i plan on really doing some cool stuff with link management, so start populating your links page with some content!)
  3. Ability to back-up your galleries
  4. Automatic backup of a RSS version of your journal (both both backup features are disabled for today, I'll get them back up tonight)

The bigger changes are more along the UI front:

Here is a screenshot from the usericon management screen. Most of all screens will look this way from now on: a checkbox, the name of the item in bigger text, and supplementary information beneath the name of the item. Individually actionable items (Edit and Delete) will be located to the far right. If you scroll down on any given page, you'll also see the ability to check all checkboxes and delete all items.  

I've tried to cut down on unnecessary page reloads; the first step was simply the edit screen for any item. Clicking "Edit" on any icon will bring up this screen w/o reloading:

 

This whole inline dialog thing was the biggest "new" thing I had tried on listfoo that I liked, so I'm going to adapt it extensively into Tabulas' UI. In the future, I want to run ajax queries so the Delete Confirmation pages are also being generated inline - there really is no need to be reloading new pages for that. 

Before accessing the new control panel, please understand and read these warnings:

  • Understand this is an actual work in progress - things may break at any time. If things break, go to the older control panel and fix your problem
  • This is not even remotely done - I expect there to be at least another month of work to be done before I feel it's ready to replace the existing control panel
  • Please feel free to report bugs, problems, and suggestions as comments in any control panel-related post. Please refrain from posting control panel problems in non-control panel posts :)
  • If you're looking to be blown away, you'll be dissappointed. This is a serious work-in-progress. If you want to get the whole experience, just wait a month and give it a whirl then! :)
  • This thing has only been tested for FireFox in Mac; it should work fine in FireFox for Windows. All other browsers, beware. I haven't had time to do stability testing on other browsers!
Posted by roy on October 4, 2006 at 03:27 PM in Web Development, Tabulas | 5 Comments

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Comment posted on October 7th, 2006 at 02:13 AM
You should actually check the link.

<a href="http://www.tabulas.com/~site/">www.tabulas.com/~site/</a>

;)
Comment posted on October 5th, 2006 at 09:09 AM
you're such a genius!
thanks for all your work!
Comment posted on October 5th, 2006 at 06:57 AM
I've got a gorgeous, big screen monitor at work, and that's what using to look at the new control panel. It's fantastic.
Comment posted on October 4th, 2006 at 03:59 PM
OH SNAP!

wait, is there auto-save now?
Comment posted on October 4th, 2006 at 04:12 PM
There will be. It's a bit buggy when I tested it yesterday so I turned it off for now.

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