AdminCentral conceptual overview

Concepts

General layout

The AdminCentral interface can be decomposed into three areas visualized by the gray boxes in the mockup above.

The menu sidebar area on the right-hand side (left-hand side for RTL setups) contains the main menu providing access to all work-related interfaces (1), namely for dealing with content and for viewing todos and work items. Menu items may show notification badges to inform the user of updates or changes (2). The menu may be extended by the user through the addition of favorites added to the corresponding menu group (3). Favorites are lists of items or simple links to items the user often works on. The magnet is a special function, which may be used to temporarily assemble items such as pages and assets in sets and perform bulk actions on them (e.g. downloading or exporting, delete or mark all). It may also act as starting point for defining the mentioned list of favorite items - this has to be further looked at still, however.

The space to the right of the main menu is the workspace, which represents the canvas the user works on. It consists of the content area containing all items he or she is currently working with, and the actions sidebar area, which holds both the actions (12) applicable to the selected item or items and a preview (15) of it. It may also display additional info on an item by showing panels e.g. visualizing its (comprehensive) status or available versions (14).

The meta menu located in the upper right corner houses a menu for accessing the personal profile and settings of the logged-in user. It also offers a place to show both system notifications as well as new private messages (should we choose to implement the latter). If new warning or error messages are issued and went unnoticed, an icon here signals that. Help pages and link to documentation in general are also available in the meta menu.

Working with AdminCentral

The orange flow illustrates, how a user places elements on the workspace. By selecting a particular menu, a set of items is placed in this space , which the user may then filter, sort and view in different ways.

One prominent filter sets the views to only show items belonging to a specific subset of items (5) . Examples are a subset showing videos, images or a set of pages of a specific site only. Note that there may be a filter for showing the entire item set as well (e.g. "all assets" for showing audio, image and video files). An item subset can be displayed using one or more views (7). Examples are a view visualizing the site structure, a view displaying all pages as a simple, flat list or a view representing all image assets as thumbnail images. A view may provide different filter and sorting options in the toolbar already containing the view selectors (8). Additional, less used filters and selectors may be hidden by default and are unveiled by launching an advanced search query (see below).

Note that any such filter or selector is only shown if required. As an example, if there's only one item set in a particular workspace e.g. there's only a list of pages to be shown, there's no need to visualize its filter (tab). Likewise, if an item set contains only one view, the view is not named anywhere in the interface and no view selection switch exists in the toolbar either.

The toolbar also offers a search function (10), which can be used to further restrict the set or subset of items shown. The basic search acts like a simple text filter on a number of typically used item attributes and content. An advanced search facility allows to formulate more complex queries, which may be saved and added to the existing list of item subsets (6).

The blue flow visualizes interface elements enabling the user to work on and with items in the workspace. A user collects one or more items to work on by selecting them in the main view in the content area (9). The actions view (12) in the sidebar on the right adapts to show actions applicable to such selected items. Likewise, the preview on the bottom shows a rendition of the selection (15) if possible. It allows to quickly identify items without having to open them. The actions sidebar may also offer additional info on the selected item such as a view showing the full page status consisting of publication, work flow and collaboration status. A different view could provide access to the history and available versions of the selected item. On a more technical note, the upper part of the sidebar here works like a rack defined in visual page editing and thus contains units which may be maximized and minimized, but here may also be closed again.

If no items are selected, the actions view shows functions applicable to the workspace and its entire item set in general. It could show site-level actions such as functions to take the site offline or reset page counters. Likewise, the preview view would show a rendition of the home page of a site in single site setups.

The lower part of the actions view (13) hosts the undo/redo functionality of AdminCentral as well as a clipboard for copying and pasting items.

Preserving the context of a workspace

If you switch to a different workspace, the context of the original workspace is preserved. The state of the item set filters, view selectors and possibly additional filter and sort options are saved and restored once you switch back.

Note that the set of items shown must be current. If items are thus added, changed or removed, all workspaces - currently visible and invisible once - must be updated as soon as possible, but at the latest when a workspace becomes visible again. State information such as the current selected item(s) and scroll position should be preserved as well, as long as still feasible after a change has been applied.