Problem Solving and Version History

Problem Solving

Some problems, questions and answers about Frontend Dashboard.

 

Where are the global areas?

Frontend Dashboard deliberately has no global areas. It is intended to be used as a secondary theme where it has to coexist with the main theme of the site. 

With that in mind, all areas are specific to the pages so any navigation, header or footer content within Frontend Dashboard pages cannot accidentally interfere with that of the main theme pages.

If you really want some global areas, you can add your own page templates edited from the provided templates.

How do I set up help text?

If you add a page attribute with the handle 'help_text', the content of that attribute will be used for the help message. 

Without the attribute, the page description will be used as help text.

Help text is only shown to users with access to the dashboard toolbar, so will never be visible to guest visitors.

In v8 this is help tab to the top-right of the window. In v9+, this is help button to the right of the dashboard toolbar.

In v9+, the core provides a general CMS help panel for all front end pages. Frontend Dashboard help text is by default prepended to the core help. You can change this by editing application/config/generated_overrides/jl_theme_dashboard.php

Options available in v9 are:

• null/0/false/none - no help
• start - at start of help panel
• end - at end of help panel
• replace/all - replace content of help panel

The default setting for v9 help is 'start'.

What is the difference between v8 and v9 Frontend Dashboard?

Frontend Dashboard takes its styling from the core dashboard theme, so the look of Frontend Dashboard pages is substantially different between v8 and v9.

The other key differences are:

• The location of the help button.
• In v9, we have configuration options for how help text works with the core help text.
• In v9, there is a header area for breadcrumbs. This can be used with an autonav block and the breadcrumb block template.

Block templates provided by Frontend Dashboard will adapt to work with whichever core version is installed.

Site visitors cannot see the help text

Only users with access to the dashboard toolbar can see help text because the help functionality is built into the toolbar, not into the Frontend Dashboard page.

In most cases, this will not matter because the usual use of Frontend Dashboard is to provide guidance and community pages to the administration and editing users. You will have set permissions so that guest visitors cannot see the Frontend Dashboard pages.

If you really need to show Frontend Dashboard pages to guest visitors (a we do in these pages) and you want them to see help text (which we don't show in these pages so as not to mislead), you can implement a help dropdown or slideout using Button Nav.

Site visitors cannot use favorites

Only users with access to the dashboard toolbar can use favorites because the favorites functionality is built into the toolbar, not into the Frontend Dashboard page.

Guest visitors do not have access to the dashboard favorites system.

Is there any 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.

How do I add customizable styles?

There are no customizable styles in Frontend Dashboard. 

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

If you really want to customize styles, you can do so using any of:

• A header extra content attribute.
• An HTML block (consider using my Safe HTML template).
• Use a Script Output block to add styles to the header.
• Use the Theme Styling Tool addon.
• Site wide in the Tracking Codes dashboard page.

Whatever you do, take care to scope your styles to act within .jl-theme-dashboard or they could bleed out over edit dialogues and other dashboard content.

How do you make a theme work with v8 and v9?

Its difficult and its not really anything important here, but in case you were wondering...

First off, Frontend Dashboard is not your average theme. It doesn't do much in the way of setting its own styles. It does a lot to pull in and work with existing dashboard styles. With that in mind, it has to be different between v8 and v9 - not the same!

To achieve this Frontend Dashboard adopts a number of tricks:

• In many cases, bootstrap 3 and bootstrap 5 classes and attributes are both added to elements, allowing each to act depending on the core version. This is the main technique within edit dialogs and within block templates.
• Where it can't be done with CSS selectors and classes, we have some conditional code that either checks for a PHP class existing, or checks for the core version installed.
• Within such code, classes are often fully referenced where instantiated, rather than with a PHP 'use' at the top of the page, because a 'use' would break the compile check.
• Within the theme templates, the header and footer elements split between v8 and v9 versions according to a core version check.

Similar tricks have been used throughout my addons and themes to enable dual compatibility between Concrete CMS v9 and v8. The tricks are necessarily more widespread for Frontend Dashboard.