Thanks for a really fine module that makes it easy to display blocks of content in the main area of a drupal page.

It would be wonderful if you could:

1.) add top right and bottom right dashboards. Perhaps this would call for renaming the dashboards as Top left, Top right, Mid left, Mid right, Bottom left, Bottom right? I don't know.

2.) provide a setting in the dashboard admin to turn on/off the exact dashboards that someone wants to use

3.) provide a text area above the top dashboard that could be used to fill in some intro text (similar to views module's header text area), may be even an image. This would make dashboard a great way to have an index page for a site section. Currently, one has to sacrifice a dashboard for this purpose (intro text).

4.) not require *all* the dashboards. I guess this is related to 2?

Comments

merlinofchaos’s picture

Status: Active » Closed (won't fix)

1.) add top right and bottom right dashboards. Perhaps this would call for renaming the dashboards as Top left, Top right, Mid left, Mid right, Bottom left, Bottom right? I don't know.

You can accomplish this via 'embedding' dashboards; that is, printing one dashboard inside another. While it's a little bit complex, it allows you almost any combination you would like. You can even do 3 column dashboards this way, but that gets a little ugly because it requires CSS mods. I want to do a 3 column dashboard at some point.

3.) provide a text area above the top dashboard that could be used to fill in some intro text (similar to views module's header text area), may be even an image. This would make dashboard a great way to have an index page for a site section. Currently, one has to sacrifice a dashboard for this purpose (intro text).

Same thing. Put a dashboard inside the the top box of the dashboard. You could then do:

Row 1: (dashboard #2, top) <-- stick your header here
Row 2: (dashboard #2, left) (dashboard #2, right)
(dashboard #2, bottom)
(dashboard #1, left), (dashboard #1 right)
(dashbaord #1, bottom)

I know, it's more complex, but it does give you pretty much all the functionality you need, and no new code needs to be written.

merlinofchaos’s picture

Argh, my bad; I use <-- to point to something and everything after that got eaten by the filter. And of course you can't edit followups, and I hit submit without preview. Bad me.

No matter -- I was just demonstrating that by using dashboards within dashboards you can get basically arbitrary numbers of rows and columns.

venkat-rk’s picture

Oh! I did read the 'embedding dashboards' documentation on logrus.com, but it didn't strike me as the solution. Thanks for the tip.

Do you think you could make a dashboard not required? Or should I raise that as a separate issue?

merlinofchaos’s picture

Do you think you could make a dashboard not required?

I don't know what you mean by this? The title is the only thing required on a dashboard, and that's because in Drupal all nodes require titles. The way to deal with THAT is to create a node-dashboard.tpl.php file and remove extraneous stuff from dashboard display.

Oh and to edit page.tpl.php to check to see if $node->type is dashboard and if so not print the title. I'm not fond of that solution, but Drupal requires titles on nodes.

venkat-rk’s picture

Well, I got confused seeing the red asterisks next to each dashboard name. I thought it meant it was 'required'. Thanks again.

jivyb’s picture

Oh and to edit page.tpl.php to check to see if $node->type is dashboard and if so not print the title. I'm not fond of that solution, but Drupal requires titles on nodes.

Even though you're not fond of this solution, would you be willing to post how to do it? My node-dashboard.tpl.php file doesn't have the title in it, yet it's still displayed--not sure why...