FrontEndUsers Gets a Nip...

Validation

FrontEndUsers has been a rock-solid module for a good long while.... There was a time when it was the new thing on the block, and it looked exciting and new compared to other modules available for CMS at the time.  but like everything, it had started to show it's age.  Other modules caught up to it, and exceeded it in look and feel.   It needed a minor bit of surgery.

While working on the CGUserDirectory module, I wanted to have the ability to enable wysiwyg editors for some text area properties in FEU, so that authorized frontend users could use a wysiwyg editor to edit their biography or something.   So I set about implementing this feature.  It was more complicated than I wanted.

So I ended up re-writing the entire way properties are defined, and managed to actually shrink the code, implement the wysiwyg stuff, and make it look better.   I made the property creation process into a one step process, using a tiny bit of javascript.   Initially when we created CMS we wanted it to work in the admin without javascript, but in the last couple of years, that idea has gone out the window.  We can now assume that users will have javascript enabled on their browser when logged into the admin section.... that makes things a bit easier.

Then I got carried away and went after group creation and editing.... the field order stuff in there was kinda old and stale, and there wasn't enough checking going on, so I tackled this too... Now we have the familiar up/down arrows for re-arranging fields.

Next came the preferences tab.  I wanted to add a preference to define the default expiry interval when creating new users, and I noticed the preferences tab was looking kinda old... so I opened up the template file in my editor, and started moving things around, and added some fieldsets.... now it looks much better, and there are a couple more preferences.

The users tab had the same 'looking old problem'.... so it only took a few minutes and that tab looked much better.

So to summarize, although I haven't really put any new funky, flashy features into FEU, it did get a couple of incremental improvements, and a 'nip here', and a 'tuck there' so that it looks a little better, looks new and refreshed, and is ready to go for a couple of more years.

I should be releasing it this week.... keep posted.