Plugin: Missing Link (Manage EE2 content from the frontend)

When you note in the description on your site that it recognizes other EE-supplied themes, does this include some sort of recognition of custom themes (e.g., transparency so other colors display). You knew I would ask 😉.

If your custom theme includes a jQuery UI style then you’ll be fine. The best way to test it is to login to your control panel and then to click on Recent Comments or Recent Entries. The Missing Link dialog will look like that.

The specific file it uses is /themes/jquery_ui/yourtheme/jquery-ui-1.7.2.custom.css.

Hi Dom,

Sounds really interesting, but can’t you do most of this stuff through the SAEF?

Jamie

I’m not sure that an SAEF really solves the same problem. The issue is not that EE lacks a good interface for managing content, it’s that there is no link between the content management interface and the site itself. Even if you built a really great SAEF, which is going to be a significant amount of work for all but the most basic of channels, you still need to link it up with the content. You’d still need to spend time designing your own admin links/menu, worrying about permissions and so on.

I wouldn’t argue that this is the absolute best possible way to provide admin access from the frontend of a site, but I’d say it’s pretty good way and it’s certainly likely to be the quickest and easiest to implement.

If you haven’t already then have a quick look at the demo screencast, as that should clear up the difference between this and a standard SAEF.

This is really interesting. Though I dont have experience with a CMS that have a nice way to edit stuff in the frontend, I do believe most customers for most sites will apriciate it.

Now there is a connection between the data they input and what they see on the site. You have LG Live Look, but there is no real visual connection between where the content will live on the site, right?

It seems simple and good. A couple suggestions:

• Add keyboard shortcuts. The steps it takes to do something seems clunkyish. ** Maybe its better that it pops up when you hover it. Maybe there should be alternative ways to show the ADMIN button. Bigger, more visual, so that its easier for the users to spot it.
• When you delete an entry, does it really redirect to the CP? Isnt that wrong according to the rest of the workflow? Keeping them in the frontend?

Keyboard shortcuts are a good idea, and I’ll certainly look into it. As for triggering the menu, I’m not sure it’d be a good idea for it to pop up on mouse over as I think that could easily result in false positives (“I’ll just click on the Trash icon down there - oh bugger”). If that was your preference it would only be a small change to make and I can point out where. If you wanted to replace the Admin button with your own, that’s literally a case of replacing one image with another. I spent a while umming and aahing over the default button and decided that something fairly generic would work best, as there’s no knowing what colour scheme people will be using for their sites.

As for entry deletion, that’s a frustrating inconsistency that I can’t see a way around. Here’s why: You can only access that delete confirmation page by POSTing data to it. Although the ‘Delete this entry’ link looks like any other, it’s actually posting a form, and to my knowledge there’s no way of posting data into a Fancybox iframe. If any jQuery geniuses could see a way around that I’d be all ears.

I had another a-ha moment: I assume most customers won’t remember keyboard shortcuts. Could you improve the workflow somehow, make it faster, snappier, less clicking, etc.

Im not quite sure I understand you correctly: The popover was simply to reduce one click. Do you think it will be easier to delete entries by mistake?

I agree that a generic button is good. What I was thinking though, was an alternative mode where all the options was somehow sitting someplace, visible, ready to click. Maybe a bar on the bottom/top, like this CMS system. The mode would of course be selectable, so you can switch.

As for form submission, im not sure. One way would be to add an action to your module, which create a page with a invisible form that gets submitted right away. Then you could just open that as a link in FancyBox, with the specified id in the url. Might be hacky, but it works.

I got the impression you meant that the menu should appear when users hovered over the button, as opposed to when they clicked on it. If that’s not what you were getting at then my mistake.

Having a passthrough page for entry deletion is another interesting idea which I’ll look into. Thanks for the feedback.

Actually, I did mean exactly that. Do you think it would be a usability problem if it does pop up? They still have to click to execute any action?

I wasn’t suggesting that it would lead to users inadvertently clicking on the menu links when they didn’t mean to, but I think it’s likely that they would open up the menu unintentionally from time to time. To reiterate my example, a user might move the cursor down towards their dock/taskbar and hover over the Admin button whilst doing so. That would then open the menu and they’d have to close it before continuing to browse the site. Opening menus via hover makes sense if they’re drop-downs that can automatically hide when the cursor moves away, but that’s not the case here.

To be honest, I don’t see the click-to-open behaviour as being at all inappropriate. The menu is there when you want it and keeps out of the way when you don’t.

I think I will reconsider my views after trying it, but I agree that it probaly isnt a problem. Its hard to judge the feel of something based on a video.

Thanks for posting the screencast.. this looks very promising. I’m not working on any EE 2 sites for awhile, but will try this out when I do.

My approach for connecting the front-end to the CP in EE 1 has been to make custom EDIT and PUBLISH buttons via the member_group conditional technique shown in Ryan Irelan’s screencasts. But managing the templates gets to be a pain when the member groups vary from template to template and when new member groups are added. Missing Link sounds like it can eliminate that issue.

The Missing Link UI looks well considered and polished. My vote would be to keep the current behavior of the Admin button. Changing the behavior so that menu appears on hover would be annoying.

I do suggest, though, that the marketing text for Missing Link be tweaked. The following sentence seems misleading to me: “Missing Link makes it possible to access all of EE2’s major content and site management features from the front-end of your site.” While technically correct, this sentence probably makes many EE developers think SAEF. It might be better to have them think about a powerful connection between the front-end and the Control panel…. more specifically, an easy-to-use connection that clients will greatly appreciate.

Been looking for something like this, so I purchased it. Unfortunately I am running into a small problem: my system directory resides outside the root of my home directory, so it is unable to load any of the requisite images, etc.

I worked around my issue by editing the plugin file to change the path of the theme, so that will work for now. Really enjoying the utility of this plugin!