Proposal: silverstripe-stride

[zanderwar]

silverleague/silverstripe-stride

Why?

Occasionally you may be required to provide a client with a safe way to modify CSS, Javascript and/or .SS template files, but don't want to provide FTP access for example, this module would add a LeftAndMain interface which would scan the /themes/ directory and index the files within which can be then edited directly through the CMS.

The module would be fully permissive, that is if you only wanted to allow the end user to edit CSS, Javascript, and/or Templates etc you could do so via CMS permissions or even a YAML configuration.

Whats the name mean?

Stride is just a play on words and really is just Stripe and IDE conjoined

Details

This module will provide an interface for end-users to modify their theme-related files directly within the CMS

Functionality

• Ace Editor Implementation into a CMS LeftAndMain subclass.
• Permissions to Edit, View existing files and to Create new files
• Create CSS files
• Create Javascript files
• Create SS template files
• Indexing for template functionality. E.g. $ThemeEditorJS and $ThemeEditorCSS to pull in all requirements(?). New templates can just be added using the <% include File %> template tag that already exists, or maybe a custom Requirements backend that does this on-the-go
• Create new CSS, JS and Template Files (.SS)
• Ability to have multiple files open at once (some rather straight forward JS to accomplish this)
• Capture Cmd + S / Ctrl + S and save
• Warning for leaving the page with unsaved files
• Flush on file save
• Flush on "create template"
• Blame History
• Rollback Functionality

Suggestions

• "Create New" from a predefined template (ie navigation menu etc)
  • We can populate this from a public repo using any number of means
  • Subclass detection of Page and offer where appropriate
• Custom Ace Editor syntax highlighting for SS template files
• Support for an existing community module that provides a Requirements backend for a PHP CSS pre-processor

[robbieaverill]

What kind of in-browse IDE would we use for this? CodeMirror seems like a pretty common option.

[zanderwar]

I've had great experiences with implementing Ace Editor could put it to a vote

[Firesphere]

Ace looks good

[andrewandante]

I've seen this kind of thing somewhere before. Main concern is that your theme is no longer stored in git. Which is odd. This is the one I have seen: https://github.com/silverstripe-archive/silverstripe-dynamictemplate However, I see the use case. +1 for Ace, used it for a Yaml field before. I forked another module: Original: https://github.com/nathancox/silverstripe-codeeditorfield Mine: https://github.com/andrewandante/silverstripe-codeeditorfield Need to make that PR. Oops!

[zanderwar]

Thanks for the CodeEditorField, It's been tightly coupled with the POC I'm working on at the moment, have updated it to be compatible with SS4 and cleaned it up quite significantly. Credit is given to the original author(s)

[madmatt]

I don't know that editing files on the filesystem is a good idea. In any multi-server environment this won't work and will end up being inconsistently applied - as well as the issue that then your UAT and production environments are different, and neither of them are built from a common source (version control system).

Even if you you add a system like Drupal Features that make these a bit easier to export and re-apply to other environments I think this isn't the greatest option. At the very least, it needs to be really clear that a template on-disk has been modified.

Perhaps the better option that modifying files in place is to store templates in the database, and allow database templates to override local files if they exist. That way the physical codebase doesn't change, you avoid concurrency/multi-server issues, and as long as it's clear where a template has come from (e.g. adding a URL variable to enable SSViewer.source_file_comments and indicating overridden templates) it would make it easy for developers to figure out why any changes they make aren't working.

[Firesphere]

Perhaps the better option that modifying files in place is to store templates in the database, and allow database templates to override local files if they exist.

I think there's a module that does exactly that. Allowing "inline templates" to be built from given.
https://github.com/nyeholt/silverstripe-usertemplates I think does that.

[Firesphere]

Also, in addition to @madmatt his comment.
The changes won't reflect in a VCS repository, thus be overwritten on the next deploy, possibly causing frustration, confusion, anger and all kinds of other things.