New CMS: AdminPages. uses sortable tree to arrange pages

Rails
1

Hi all,
I spent the last three days on a half-serious attempt at creating a
simple, minimal CMS system on rails.

check it out at http://adminpages.flowdev.de

What it can do:
manage pages in a sortable tree
Add custom page elements
Three page elements ready: Raw HTML, WYSIWYG editor, Rails
render_component interface
Sort page elements with drag&drop
Choose page layout
choose page element layout
page caching
nice URLs

What it can’t (yet) do:
Any form of access/rights management (apart from login)
Configuration is now in code, no central way to set available page
elements etc
Tree sorting only works when no page is edited (JavaScript bugs)

If you want to play around with the code, get it here:
http://adminpages.flowdev.de/adminpages.tar.gz

If some of you show interest, I can put it on rubyforge.
Oh yeah, BSD license (or the rails license anyway, I forgot)

Cheers,
Martin

2

Martin wrote:

Hi all,
I spent the last three days on a half-serious attempt at creating a
simple, minimal CMS system on rails.

check it out at http://adminpages.flowdev.de

What it can do:
manage pages in a sortable tree
Add custom page elements
Three page elements ready: Raw HTML, WYSIWYG editor, Rails
render_component interface
Sort page elements with drag&drop
Choose page layout
choose page element layout
page caching
nice URLs

Hey, that’s awesome! I’m gonna try to install it, that’s just what I was
looking for

3

Martin wrote:

Hi all,
I spent the last three days on a half-serious attempt at creating a
simple, minimal CMS system on rails.

check it out at http://adminpages.flowdev.de

I saw that you use the admin engine. Any chance of putting your stuff in
an engine?

4

Cool stuff!

One feature that would be really sweet is a page template kind of
thing…

The page template could work like an ‘layout file’ where you specify
where objects goes.
Each object should have a type, like image, wysiwyg, raw-html,
container and so on just like today buy instead of just have them in
a list you connects them to different parts of the page. (page
templates specifies with parts are available on this page)

Container type holds a list of objects just like each page does today
in your cms.

Example:

Template 1

|(1) |
| (2)|

(3)

Object (1): Image (on edit becomes an image select type of thing-
Object (2): Html
Object (3): Container (can hold many objects)

Template 2

|(1) |
| (2) |

(3) (4)

Object (1): Image
Object (2): wysiwyg
Object (3): Container
Object (4): Container

And when you create or edit one of your pages you choose what kind of
template this page should render and you can then connect your
objects to different parts of the page.

Don’t know if explained my dream features good enough but i did some
ascii drawings at least :wink:

All i wanted to say was nice work, buy my head got spinning…

–
Mathias Stjernstrom

5

Mathias Stjernström wrote:

Cool stuff!

One feature that would be really sweet is a page template kind of
thing…

Mathias,
that was something I planned, too. You have several sortable lists,
representing columns on the final page. In the admin page, you can drag
the page elements between the different columns.
I just don’t know how to design the admin interface. Putting several
columns beside each other would result in a page about 2000 pixels wide.
Putting them under each other would result in loads of scrolling.
Hmm…I will think of something.

Stefan: I guess you mean the LoginEngine. I don’t know if putting this
into an engine makes sense, because to use it for an actual page, you
will have to rewrite many parts, or at least add new page elements. I
don’t know enough about engines to decide yet.