Open up Grid UI for devs
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First up, congratulations on the UI for grid, it’s way more polished than I was expecting tbh - nice job.
What I’d like see off the back of this is EllisLab making the grid UI pattern easily available for other add-ons, and have it documented in the developer style guide.
Nearly all complex add-ons which have repeating & sortable rows use different icons/libraries/methods and it amounts to a mish/mash user experience.
I think this is an excellent opportunity to start standardizing the control panel a little more with third party, and stop us all from having to reinvent the wheel for this pretty standard requirement.
Thanks Iain, good suggestion. I wanted to see this happen too but we didn’t quite have the time so right now things are a little too tightly coupled with Grid. But yes I’ve been thinking of a way to separate the UI and the datasource a little better, as well as a general refactor for the future, so it’s on my mind and I hope we’re able to make it happen!
Thanks for the info Kevin. Definitely something I would be interested in for one of my add-ons.
Would it be possible that when this is done, that the libraries be made available to package with the add-on so there is a consistent codebase to use when supporting older versions of EE? Even in the line of a first-party add-on for the Grid FT that customers stuck on e.g. EE 2.5 (for whatever reason) can install so we developers don’t need to create our own, fragmented solutions to support older EE installs?
Not sure on the logistics of it, it is just a thought.
I’m not sure, jeremyworboys. As the EE environment evolves and modernizes and jQuery is updated, most new features will be written for that new context. It’s unlikely we’ll write something brand new for an older environment or something as an add-on to an old version of our software. But once it’s all said and done, it may be possible to simply take out the Grid JS and images and use it, say, 2.5 for example. But it wouldn’t be officially supported and we likely won’t make working with older EE versions a goal because we wouldn’t want it to hold us back in creating something better and faster.
Thanks Kevin. It’s nice to know the team has a strong vision for the future.