Frontity Admin UI

🗣 Feature Discussions Needs Research
1

Hi everyone!
I love and all planet love WORDPRESS because it is user-friendly and have a clean dashboard ready to use…

I think FRONTITY could be more popular having a user-friendly dashboard just like WordPress cms, because not all users or people are developers…

Thanks and all the best!!!

2

Hi @adamhut114! Thanks for the suggestion and welcome to the community :relaxed: I totally agree it would be really nice to have a dashboard for Frontity. Actually, is something we already had in mind and we started discussing some time ago. You can check the conversation at this topic.

Right now, we are focusing on some core features to make the framework reliable and really useful, but we’ll definitely work in a dashboard in the future to make it more user-friendly.

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3

@adamhut114 @SantosGuillamot

Just a thought but there’s two ways this feature could be interpreted.

  1. It could be about a dashboard for frontity itself
    Personally I’d be curious to hear what kind of functionality that would give. The big advantages of Wordpress lie primarily on the user experience side when creating content, while most of what frontity is handling is the website and server itself.
  2. Another possible interpretation of this is a replacement to Wordpress’ admin panel. In which case there has been previous projects to do this sorta in the past, such as Calypso which was created in 2016. It never really went anywhere though. Automattic built it to try to start transitioning the WP community over to more JS technologies but it never really caught on.

In my opinion, a react based frontend for wordpress post creation etc would be great. But then, at that point what’s the point of really having wordpress at all?

IMO, the only thing I’m sticking around with wordpress for is Gutenberg. I think Gutenberg is great. I know a lot of people hate it. But I think the block editing thing is the future and they’ve done a recently decent job of creating the editor and making it easy to create new components.

If there were a CMS that was JUST Gutenberg and nothing else, then would be really cool. People have already taken Gutenberg and migrated it to Drupal link but I’d love to see something like Gutenberg with the custom field abilities of Directus

5

Thanks for the suggestion @adamhut114 :slight_smile:

Yes, we already have plans for this.

But @thedonquixotic, our idea for what we call the Frontity Admin UI is more oriented through the configuration of Frontity, not the replacement of the WordPress Dashboard.

Some things we have in mind:

  • Quick access to documentation.
  • Quick access to community.
  • DevTools for Frontity state and actions (similar to Redux DevTools).
  • List of Frontity Projects in your computer (similar to Local).
  • Ability to start, stop, build… those Frontity projects from the UI.
  • Search of Frontity packages.
  • Ability to install and update packages.
  • Configure settings from the UI (the frontity.settings.js file).

Configuration of the frontity.settings.js file would be done via custom React components exposed by each package. This is similar to the WordPress admin screen of PHP plugins, but made with React. Packages that don’t expose that component will get a default interface.

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6

By the way, Guillaume Chau has released a UI for npm projects like Frontity last week. I didn’t have time to check it out but it looks cool: https://guijs.dev/

As far as I know it lets you search for packages specific to a framework and install and update them.

1 Like
11

I think this is a good idea, I’d probably not call it “Admin UI” to avoid confusion but rather “Frontity Dev Tools” or something like that. I personally think it would add a lot of value if I were able to inspect the current state and requests made by frontity among other things. I’m not sure if the idea is to have this as a standalone app or something like that but I could see this being an in-browser UI that would only be loaded on dev mode at the bottom of the screen.

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14

Yes, that’s the idea for the DevTools. Something similar to the Redux DevTools.

Right now the state manager of Frontity, called Frontity Connect, is a fork of react-easy-state. But we have started collaborating with Rising Stack to revert our fork and make it only an "an opinionated API on top of react-easy-state". We already have started the work in https://github.com/frontity/frontity/pull/415 althought we are waiting for the final version of the react-easy-state hooks/middleware to be released.

After that is finished, the next step is to collaborate with them in a DevTools that can work for both Frontity Connect and React Easy State.

I hope they could be run in different places:

  • In a Chrome DevTools tab.
  • In an electron app.
  • In a VS Code package.
  • In the same browser <- For me this is very important because I want them to run on platforms like codesandbox.
16

Cool, +1 for reverting the fork and one less thing to maintain.

1 Like