VaultWiki 4: Intro to the New Admin Control Panel
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, November 8, 2010 at 1:34 AM (222527 Views)
As I mentioned in my previous entry, one of the main intents of VaultWiki 4 is to make admins' jobs easier. While I originally intended to make one video about this, there's just too many things for one video to cover. So over the next several posts (some of which will have videos), we're going to take a brief glimpse at the changes to VaultWiki's Control Panel.
Admin Style
The first thing you'll notice is the new style. We wanted to design the panel so that it could easily plug into any forum software with minimal reliance on forum-specific code. Some of the features covered in this blog series would not have worked on the default vBulletin admin styles.
The panel uses HTML5 layout and CSS3 style properties to achieve its look. Page functionality is largely driven by Javascript, built upon the YUI3 library. YUI3 allows us to load both its own and VaultWiki's scripts dynamically as you engage various features, so the initial footprint is relatively small. Of course, all functionality has a non-Javascript fallback, but you need Javascript enabled if you want to do things easier and faster and feel like the control panel is a living entity.
Since vBulletin currently doesn't have such an offering, we also intend to add a suture script for Javascript files to reduce latency, which would be used both in and out of the control panel. For those who don't know, a suture script combines multiple files into one fetch, rather than loading each one individually. This reduces the number of times the end user sends data and waits for responses. At the time of writing, a suture script has not yet been implemented.
Admin Index
Once logged in, the control panel index shows the version of VaultWiki you have installed, including the build number, and checks it against the latest version posted on our server.
Because the index shows all this information, even if you're already running the latest version, you can easily see if the package was updated. This check is more specific than that of most modifications, so the complete output wouldn't be available via the Product Manager's version checker.
Admin Menu
Rather than have a large number of VaultWiki admin links in vBulletin's frame as before, we've broken some panels into multiple pages, and given some of them new names to make them easier to identify for a new user.
For example, in the Structures menu, you'll see no mention of "Namespaces". Namespaces were a necessary evil when mapping the wiki through a forum system, but we have ditched that method in VaultWiki 4. While articles can still be namespaced internally, we're no longer using the term because many users found it inherently confusing. Instead, we're now calling them "Prefixes".
More on Prefixes in the next entry.