Hi everyone! My Summer of Code Project for the summer is Enhanced Frontend Editing. Ashwin, my mentor for the summer, posted earlier about the first feature, which is to create in-place editing for module, menu item and article titles at the Joomla! Frontend. I wanted to update you on its status as well as give you a brief on the other features/milestones of my project.

Regarding in-place editing, I’m still fixing and modifying things, so it isn’t complete in any way yet and still has a few bugs. It is a little prettier now, though. I wanted some feedback from you guys so that I could nail down some User Interface aspects. I have set up a demo at http://ankitahuja.com/playground/joomla and I'll be glad if you could take the time to go there and give it a try. You can use the username: ‘test_admin’ and password:’ankit’ ( without the quotes) to login at the frontend.

Once you login, you will be able to see a ‘turn editing on’ link at the top right corner which you will need to click in order to begin editing. You will then be able to edit module titles, menu item titles and article titles by clicking on them. Here’s a screenshot:

I will love to know your views on it including on some particular issues:

  • Location of the toggle link for turning editing on/off
  • For changing the hover color, later I might allow the user to change the hover color via admin interface. And yes, you can always override the specific CSS property. I’m also trying to find a way of highlighting that might be a little more template independent. Any ideas are always welcome.

One of the major things I still have to do in regard to this feature is to test this against a variety of templates to make sure that it is completely template independent and works properly. I want to make the UI fun to use and as unobtrusive as possible. Also, since there is going to be a lot JavaScript involved, I want to make sure it's quick & does not lag.

This was about the first milestone of my project. Here are the other milestones of my project, listed in the order that I will be working on them:

  • Editing of articles in a modal popup
  • Editing module & menu-item parameters in a modal popup
  • Drag & Drop Placement of modules

I will post in more detail about each one of them as and when I take them up.

You can know more about my project ( and me! ) by going to my project’s community page here: https://community.joomla.org/gsoc2009/ankit-ahuja.html.

Please feel free to give any suggestions/feedback/ideas you may have at this forum thread: https://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?f=231&t=396033

You can also check back on the demo every now and then ( to catch a sneak peek! ) as I update it often. 

Thank You!