Trash manager support for 3PD components

[Jinx]

The 4.5.2 roadmap says that support for categories and sections will be added to the trash manager. Is it also possible to consider adding support for 3PD components ? Maybe a 3PD component could insert it's own tab through a trash mambot ?

[stingrey]

The 4.5.2 roadmap says that support for categories and sections will be added to the trash manager.Actually I am only looking at the possibility, and thinking about it may be wiser to wait till the introduction of NBS before implementing such a feature.


Allowing trash handling for 3PD Components is an interesting idea that deserves examination.

[mmx]

Actually I am only looking at the possibility, and thinking about it may be wiser to wait till the introduction of NBS before implementing such a feature.


Allowing trash handling for 3PD Components is an interesting idea that deserves examination.
1-2 Months for 4.5.2 and 3-4 months for 4.5.3. 4.6 is due to be a major release, so what ... 8-12 months. Having the ability to use Thrash at the component level make Mambo even more dummy proof.

[Jinx]

Actually I am only looking at the possibility, and thinking about it may be wiser to wait till the introduction of NBS before implementing such a feature.

Allowing trash handling for 3PD Components is an interesting idea that deserves examination.

Why would u do this ? Waiting until NBS means waiting until 4.6. Like mmx already said, a trash manager at component level wil make mambo even more dummy proof. We could offcourse create our own trash manager duplicating the mambo methodology. In my opinion this isn't a very consistent approach, having to duplicate mambo core functionality inside a 3PD. It would be a far more usuable approach if such functionality would be available through one centralised manager.

My main critism at the moment is the fact that the new core functionality isn't available for 3PD. Like the trash manager, the multiple level backend menu's, ... Don't understand me wrong, the core team has done a great job, i'm only a bit disappointed to see that the roadmap for 4.5.2 and 4.5.3 doens't mention improvements in core functionality to make them available for 3PD. Larger components like DOCMan, Simpleboard, ... would certainly benefit from this as will the user !

[mmx]

Rey and Jinx... this is unrelated to this topic but it might be useful to introduce it into this thread as a means of discussing the reusability of components.

Take a component like com_contacts. If it was possible to create private categories, it would be possible to store privileged information from other components in com_contact. For example, a store could create categories for its Customer, Vendor, Manufacturer, and Affiliate records as well as the public contacts for the store.

In a similar light, something like a store could create private categories in Docman for downloadable products like software. You would not want the user to see these records for obvious reasons.

In working on the Zencart project, it became very apparent that I was reinventing the wheel in the sense that much of what I needed already existed in other components. This aspect of a component and how it could be a reusable resource has not been discussed thus far.

If it were possible to do the above, a package would have dependencies on other components for it to fully work. This leads back to the installer which would need the smarts to catch depedencies of this nature and issue a warning message, possibly included in the installer file.

I would agree in this particular case, that NBS is a better vehicle for supporting this kind of reusability because the concept of NBS should allow individual components to expose or advertise services to other components.

[Jinx]

I would agree in this particular case, that NBS is a better vehicle for supporting this kind of reusability because the concept of NBS should allow individual components to expose or advertise services to other components.

I agree ! We could already start implementing those things in a more basic form. For example, 4.5.1 allows u to link a content item/category to a menu item. This functionality isn't available for 3PD.
If this would be the case we could allow users to link a docman category to a certain menu item. Making this menu item private would be a first step towards cross-component functionality as mmx describes.

[mmx]

Rey... you might note that I'm playing with a copy of com_contact and have been experimenting with using it as a centralized contact manager for the e-commerce package. A new non-advertised access level (maybe 'private' or 'internal') could handle the problem of concealing the categories. Creating relationships with other components would probably mean an extra field for storing the component's option name (which would have to wait until database changes are allowed). You may have better ideas for handling this sort of thing.

[mmx]

Thinking out loud... if an extra table were added, components could advertise services to other components.