3.1 admin zone.

Chris Graham said

amichan said

ah ok, for me it just makes the system harder to run and harder to find what I am looking for. Like right now I am looking for where to edit the top menu but have yet to find it but it should be a new feature of 3.1 which I have but am still unable to find it.

I believe I posted an example when I announced the feature. This is an extension of the ocPortal architecture of the menu and Tempcode systems, rather than something represented in the administrative interface. To enable it you need to place a block reference to the menu block in the TOP template, in place of the existing Tempcode for the hardcoded zone menu.

Is there a new block called top then?
I mean if I still have to edit the template then it seems that its still not much of a feature because it is no different from what I was doing.

what if some new member sees that feature and also goes looking for it just like I did and is unable to find it.
you will either get another topic like mine (which was not replied to but you replied to it here so no biggy)
Or the new member/ user will get frustrated and not use it.

I've looked up how I originally announced this feature:

Chris Graham said

I've just implemented support for a new menu type in 3.1 – a menu that can replace the hard-coded zone menu with a custom one. You can now just strip out the code for the zone menu from the TOP template and replace it with something like…

Code

{$BLOCK,block=side_stored_menu,param=my_new_menu,type=zone}


You can then use the menu editor to manage the 'my_new_menu' menu just like any menu.

ocPortal could never solve every need in a graphical way, because our users are wanting a lot of different things, contradictory things. If we try and provide a graphical option for everything, those options would together be overwhelming, and we'd be back to square one with things being too difficult to find.
By laying things out logically, in a software architecture, at least these features can be found by 'thinking laterally'.
In addition here this feature is dependent on the theme, so if we added an option for it and a different theme was being used, the option would not necessarily make sense.

We are listening to all the feedback given to us and thinking of solutions. I may have found a solution for this, but these decisions are not easy, and a lot of factors have to be weighed to make them. We also have a development schedule to work within, and it's important to understand that ocProducts has set things up, licence wise and practically wise, so that nobody is dependent on us introducing feature changes – any competent PHP programmer can do it.

It is no longer ocProducts policy to publicly debate our design decisions, so we will be closing this topic. The explanation of our design decision that I made above is an exception to this rule, to demonstrate that we don't go blindly forward. Please keep giving feedback, but also please make sure that feedback is concise and fresh so you do not turn the forum into a battle-ground, because that is only likely to frustrate everybody on this forum, cause undeserved stress, and result in more closed topics.