Release of admin2++ extension version 0.2 for eZ Publish 4.4

• Publié le 19 décembre 2010 à 19:32
• 1 commentaire

As I said on Twitter, I started again to develop the admin2++ eZ Publish extension, and the result is the release of the version 0.2. As I previously wrote in Frontend performance enhancements with admin2++ eZ Publish extension and in GUI enhancements with admin2++ eZ Publish extension, I try to reach two goals with this extension :

1. Improve the performance frontend of the admin interface
2. Provide some missing GUI features and ease the use of the admin interface

The following screencast shows most of the available features of the admin2++ extension version 0.2 :

As you can see, the biggest new feature of this release is the preview available in the popup menu. Instead of loading a new page with the preview, admin2++ provides a view of the object in the front end siteaccesses without any page refresh. I also made a big work to preload as much components as possible on the login form to fill the browser's cache. With the use of the right Apache configuration, this has a great impact on the page loading time.

Quelques liens en vrac

• Publié le 25 novembre 2010 à 14:07
• 0 commentaire

En attendant d'avoir le temps d'écrire des articles avec un peu plus de contenu, voici quelques liens glanés ci et là ces derniers temps sur un peu tout :

• Un émulateur Gameboy en HTML5 et JavaScript, c'est juste énorme ce truc, de quoi tuer un peu de productivité, désolé :-)
• Il est maintenant possible de tester les performances de son sur site sur WebPageTest.org (en) avec Internet Explorer 8 avec une machine installée à Paris, auparavant seul IE7 était disponible depuis Paris.
• J'ai reçu Derrière l'écran de la révolution sociale, je l'ai même déjà commencé et après 50 pages je suis pas déçu, j'essaierai de publier une petite critique un peu plus complète quand j'aurai fini
• Tester fiablement ses navigateurs, où comment faire pour tester au mieux ses applications web. ça enfonce peu des portes ouvertes mais parfois c'est nécessaire
• Est il intéressant d'inclure jQuery depuis un CDN publique ? La réponse à cette question est, semble-t-il, oui, même si avec une plus large adoption l'effet positif pour les performances pourrait être bien plus grand.
• Un excellent article qui fait le point sur la mise en cache par les navigateurs et les (reverse) proxy, une lecture plus que recommandée à tout développeur web qui se respecte.

GUI enhancements with admin2++ eZ Publish extension

• Publié le 28 mars 2010 à 23:10
• 6 commentaires

The blog post is the continuation of Frontend performance enhancements with admin2++ eZ Publish extension published a few days ago. This one is about the additions of the admin2++ eZ Publish extension in terms of GUI and new features.

Current features provided by admin2++ extension

admin2++ extension currently provides the following features by using jQueryUI 1.8 in the new eZ Publish administration interface :

• it improves the dashboard to be easily configurable by each user (drag'n drop of blocks, ability to remove or add blocks)
• it adds some new dashboard blocks (System infos, Feed reader, Advanced search form)
• it replaces View link in context menus by a Preview link that loads a preview in AJAX
• it makes the right menu loadable in AJAX instead of requiring a page refresh when revealing it
• it adds the ability to resize the area dedicated to preview tabs, details tabs, ...
• it improves default stylesheet (colors in popup menu and dashboard blocks, round corners on all fields, yellow background to highlight currently focused field, ...)
• it adds a date picker for ezdate and ezdatetime attribute (based on jQuery instead of the default YUI2 one)

All those new features are visible in this screencast :

Future developments

I have a lot of ideas :

• jQueryUI 1.8 now includes an Autocomplete widget that would be useful to type keywords
• use of AJAX for the several operations (bookmark, add to notifications, ...)
• implement JavaScript validation on edit form as written earlier here
• drag'n drop in content tree
• add new dashboard blocks (personal note, inline search, ...)
• improve style for a more clear separations between areas
• ... and many more !

Frontend performance enhancements with admin2++ eZ Publish extension

• Publié le 23 mars 2010 à 14:29
• 4 commentaires

About a month ago, I created a new project called admin2++ on projects.ez.no. As written in the project page, the purpose of this project is to go further in the administration interface refresh both on the frontend performance and on the features for users to achieve what I wrote last november on the admin interface refresh of eZ Publish. On the frontend performance side, changes are quite hidden but are there, so it's time to do some advertising :-) In fact, it's more or less an application of my talk in Geneva on frontend performance with eZ Publish.

Current enhancements on frontend performance

The admin2++ extension provides the following enhancements to eZ Publish admin2 interface :

• the twenties background images have been incorporated into three sprites images to decrease the number of HTTP requests. This also decreases the total background images size from about 30Kb to 6Kb.
• PNG Content class icons and PNG admin2 design images have been optimized. Here again the total size of icons and images is decreased from about 200Kb to 147Kb.
• the admin2++ extension provides parts of Apache2 config files to enable GZip compression and set a far future Expires header where possible
• I also replaced the code using YUI3 (drag'n drop of sub-items when sorting with priority) or YUI2 (Date picker) JavaScript frameworks by a code based on jQuery and jQueryUI as jQuery is used for most features of admin2 and jQueryUI is used for others features provided by the extension. This avoids loading three JavaScript frameworks.
• Most of the JavaScript code executed in page has been deferred to DOM ready event instead of DOM load.
• The login page preloads the most used images and all the JavaScript files needed by the admin interface. I tried to configure eZ Publish/eZJSCore so that the JavaScript pack file generated by eZJSCore operators is the same on all pages. The browser downloads the JavaScript on the login page and then it always uses its cache on others pages. I'm happy to see that a part of this has been ported in the eZ Publish trunk :-)

What is missing, future developments ?

I wanted to override ezdesign and ezimage operators to automatically add the last modification date of a ressource in file URI so a far future header can be set on all design ressources without any browser cache issue. Unfortunately, overriding template operators is not possible for the moment. Currently, the expires is set to only seven days in expires.conf provided in the extension for most design ressources.

In addition, a lot of others small improvements would be possible like minifying inline JavaScript code or part of the HTML itself, ... and as usual, it lacks some documentation on how to set it up.