flexible layout strategies

[benbyf]

Hi gang,

Had a client request for very flexible layouts - imagine a page that you can adhocly add and remove widgets then add content to them. What strategies do people have for this type of thing.

Usually I would create a set of templates, and add the fields to those templates. Or on a more complex site add some pages as widgets to a page. But to have a set of template "elements" and then choose them is beyond me.

[LostKobrakai]

There's currently only pageTableExtended, while essentially the answer is pagefields, the UI pov is the crippling point for such an workflow.

[teppo]

Ben, have you seen the Grid Builder? The module isn't available (at least yet), but sounds very interesting.

With PageTable you can build quite flexible things already, so I'd probably go that route. Support for multiple templates for PageTable fields allows you to define various types of content blocks (or widgets), and if you need multiple columns, just add more PageTable fields.

In a recent project I built a somewhat similar concept to what you've described here. Started out with PageTableExtended, but discarded it in favor of regular PageTable as I couldn't get the UIs to match one another well enough; in the end having two "almost but not entirely identical" UIs felt more of a con than a pro

There are downsides to this approach, such as more complex front-end search, but nothing one can't solve, at least with some hook-related magic.

[MuchDev]

I did something like this for a newsletter builder that I created using a page table and then on the template i used a bunch of dropdown selectors with field options to hide and show them based on other options on the page so that certain items would show up for certain set ups. So if the option was set to partial width you would then see a dropdown with the 1-12 grid option etc.

[Jonathan Lahijani]

Has anyone heard of gridmanager.js?

http://neokoenig.github.io/jQuery-gridmanager/

I think this could be a good plugin to build a fieldtype around.

[benbyf]

not familiar with module building myself but gridmanager type thing looks like some of the higher end drupal plugins some of my clients are used too and one of the reasons they dont go with processwire (to my annoyance).

Think your right though @teppo most of what I was thinking can be done with ProField Table, but maybe grid manager and table field should get together sometime for a drink