PlatformUI December 2014 status

After the public opening of the PlatformUIBundle repository in July, the communication about the PlatformUI has been pretty low. Of course, this does not mean nothing happened in the meantime! Actually, more than 30 pull requests were opened with a focus on 3 aspects:

• Ease the installation of the PlatformUIBundle
• Add extension points
• Keep on providing the missing blocks/features

PlatformUIBundle installation

Until recently, Bower and Node.js were required to install and initialize the PlatformUI application properly. Those requirements were annoying for the regular PHP developers and prevented the PlatformUIBundle from being properly installed by composer. To avoid those issues, the PlatformUIBundle now depends on another bundle called PlatformUIAssetsBundle. This bundle provides the required assets dependencies (PureCSS, the REST JavaScript client, ...). Unless you are hacking or extending the PlatformUI application, you don’t need any Node.js based tool anymore.

Thanks to this, PlatformUIBundle is now already part of ezpublish-community when installing using composer, and you can test it out by directing your browser to ‘/shell’ URI.

Extension points

Adding various extension points in the PlatformUI application was one of the biggest task in the last 5 months. Basically, to provide those extension points we had to:

• improve/add configuration to list JavaScript modules and CSS files so that external bundles can add/change the default configuration
• add a plugin system for the various JavaScript components (views, application, view services)
• handle templates as special JavaScript modules, so that they can be easily overridden with a couple configuration lines like any other module.

The documentation on those extension points is not completely finished yet, but you can read a draft of this documentation. As usual, any feedback is really appreciated.

Newly implemented features

In addition to those under the hood changes, we also added more visible features both in the administration and editorial parts of the PlatformUI application

In the administration part, forms handling has been added. As a result, it is possible to view, create, update and delete sections. After some clean up in this area, it will serve as a model for other simple domain objects (Languages, Object States, Content types groups, ...).

In the editorial part, it is now possible to choose a content type to create a content. We also implemented the view and edit views for various field types (Image, Date, Time, ...). Most of those changes can be seen in the following screencast:

The short term goal is to support the most common field types both when viewing and editing the content while, at the same time, the work on the administration part will continue. In a longer term, some big topics will have to be tackled like the internationalization/localization, the sub-items display, the correct handling of the policies, the navigation hub (the top menu),…

One last thing, on January 15th, we are organizing our second meetup in Lyon. The topic of this meetup will be the PlatformUI, so if you are around, it will be a good opportunity to learn more about it.

Photo by Kenny Louie published under Creative Common Attribution 2.0 Generic