How to reorder the tabs in the dashboard

#1

I read that there is no customisation of the dashboard in terms of how it looks, but I was wondering if its possible to control the order of the tabs within it, mainly because I have made my first site using Vapid and other than general, the first tab is ‘footer’ and the layout is almost exactly back to front from that which I would want - I’m assuming that its basically the order that I have made the sections, is there any way to manually specify it or is removing the sections and then adding them back in the only route that I have to re-order them?

Thanks, and really enjoying Vapid so far.

Charles

#2

@Charles Good question. Right now, there isn’t a way to specify the order of form elements, but I could see how that would be useful. In fact, I’ve wanted to reorder them myself, a few times!

Also, you’re right; the layout is currently gleaned by their order in the document.

I could see it working one of a couple ways:

At the section level

{{#section about layout="title,body,photo"}}
  {{photo type=image}}
  {{title}}
  {{body type=html}}
{{/section}}

Pros: Easy to write and read
Cons: Have to keep it in sync with the field (e.g. if you add/remove some)

At the input level

{{#section about}}
  {{photo type=image}}
  {{title priority="1"}}
  {{body type=html priority="2"}}
{{/section}}

Pros: You only have to specify numbers for one that take priority, all others could fall below
Cons: Can be a pain to manage across files, or to insert fields in between two numbers.

What do you think?

#3

So I actually meant the tabs down the side in the dashboard - the tabs for the sections like general, home page, about page etc, but I had also had the problem you have described here too - I guess the solution could be similar, or perhaps a mixture of the two, the sections could have a priority whilst the ‘layout’ would be good for ordering the fields within them?

Thanks for the response.

Charles

#4

I think the “layout=…” one makes more sense. Just trying to imagine if you have 20 fields, and want to add another one between 2 others, you only have to insert the field name in the string. If you had the “priority=x” option, you’d have to edit the priority number for more fields.

#5

+1

@scott I was also wondering about this—for the most part, the inputs automatically show up in fine order. But sometimes I do want to reorder. Would it be terribly difficult to make them drag’n’drop—like the sortable=true records sorting? Maybe a handle shows up on hover? I think I saw an open feature for adding users—perhaps only the admin would be able to reorder?

I could see implementing @Charles request with the priority parameter:

{{#section about priority=2}}

It moves itself to that position, so say you have 5 sections, “about” will always be second from the top, no matter what others are added or where. And if it’s called “priority=999” it’ll always be at the bottom.

Thanks so much for your work on this awesome project!

#6

@garymazzeo Drag n’ drop is good idea, but right now everything config-related is explicitly declared in the templates. i.e., If you have access to the template, you hold the keys to the kingdom. IMO, I kind of like that separation of concerns.

Sounds like the priority param might be the way to go. I’ll leave this thread open for a little while longer, in case someone has another idea or edge case.