Two Columns

This page uses the Frontend Dashboard Two Columns page template. This is split into a pair of equal width columns. Compare what you get on the left with what you don't get on the right.

What you get

Dashboard Integration

Pages in Frontend Dashboard are designed to work with the dashboard slide-in menu. Just like real dashboard pages, they don't slide out to the left and are not masked when the dashboard panel is showing.

The dashboard slide-in menu even includes a page to index all Frontend Dashboard pages.

Favorites

For users with dashboard access, the bookmark icon is shown to the top left of the header banner, on this page to the left of 'Full Page'. Click this icon to add or remove a Frontend Dashboard page from your favorites. This is integrated with the favorites shown in the dashboard panel that slides in from the right of pages.

Help

Again for users with dashboard access, the help tab on the top-right can be clicked to show a help message over the page.

If you add a page attribute with the handle 'help_text', the content of that attribute will be used for the help message. If not, the page description will be used for the content of the help text.

Page Templates

For left sidebar, right sidebar, full width and view (single page).

Block Types

Frontend Dashboard comes with a special Dashboard Button navigation block to create individual navigation buttons with any bootstrap button style or font awesome icon.

Also provided is a Dashboard Pages block, with templates to replicate the Frontend Dashboard dashboard page within a frontend page.

Block Templates

Frontend Dashboard provides block templates for the core Core Autonav block, Manual Nav and Nestable Manual Nav, so you can build button dropdown navigation customized for your Frontend Dashboard project.

Right Column

The right column uses the area name 'Sidebar' to preserve continuity of content when switching page templates.

What you don't get

No sample content

Frontend Dashboard is not intended as a full site theme. Its main use is for providing supplementary pages for dashboard users. Pages where administrators and editors can communicate amongst themselves. Hence there is no sample content or content swap.

No page types

Again, because Frontend Dashboard is designed to supplement an existing theme, there are no predefined page types. Just the basic page templates.

No global areas

Take a look at your existing dashboard pages. Navigation on dashboard pages tends to be minimal and specific to a small cluster of pages. Global areas for navigation would get in the way of this.

You can use the Dashboard Button blocks and templates for Autonav, Manual Nav, and Nested Manual Nav to create your own small clusters of navigation. You can build navigation bars on the page or by assembling these blocks in stacks. You can copy these blocks and stacks between pages or set them up as defaults for page types.

If after considering all this you desperately want a global area, you can edit one of the existing page templates or ask me and I will supply an additional page template for you.

No customizable styles

This theme mimics the dashboard. Supporting style customization would defeat that purpose.

Last Updated: 3 years ago