dashEE - EE Dashboard Alternative

dashEE – EE Dashboard Alternative

Ever since EE 1.x I have been hoping for the ability to customize the EE dashboard (or ‘CP home’ as it’s called). We see this capability in a lot of content management systems today, typically through the implementation of widgets or some other form of add-on. Developers have the ability to add specific functionality in the form of mini-apps or widgets that users can add/remove from their respective dashboards. Unfortunately this capability has never been a priority for EE and we have been left with sending our users to the system default.

In EE 1.x users have the ability to add/remove certain information from the CP homepage by wading into a sea of radio buttons in their settings and choosing what they want to see. In EE 2.x the radio buttons are gone but they have been replaced with some javascript show/hide functionality to help users get where the need to go quickly. But we, as developers, still don’t have a way to easily modify that dashboard through code. That’s why I developed dashEE.

The idea behind dashEE is to create a completely customizable EE dashboard where users can choose the kind of information they want to see and developers can add custom functionality through the development of widgets. dashEE allows developers to create custom widgets that can be installed by themselves or that can be packaged with your custom modules. Once uploaded to the server they are available for users to add to their dashboards and drag-n-drop in any order/configuration they wish. Check out the short video below to see it in action.

dashEE is available for download completely free and open source. Check out the links on the right for installation instructions and documentation for creating your own dashEE widgets. I’m looking forward to seeing some really cool third-party widgets. Give it a try and let me know what you think.

11 Responses to dashEE – EE Dashboard Alternative

Erik Reagan September 8, 2011 at 11:13 am
Chris,

This is excellent work. I’m still a bit confused why something like this isn’t built right in to EE. Based on your video I think you’ve nailed the idea of what the dashboard should be able to do. Extra kudos for making it something that other developers can leverage in their add-ons.

I’m really looking forward to giving this a spin.

Regards,
Erik
lebisol September 8, 2011 at 12:39 pm
Sweet!
Don’t forget to add it to http://devot-ee.com/
Danielle LeComte September 8, 2011 at 3:57 pm
Looks great – can’t wait to try it!
Natetronn September 8, 2011 at 6:29 pm
I’m looking forward to trying this out as well and to see what some of the other devs end up adding to it.
Jim September 9, 2011 at 9:35 am
Really cool – I’m loving having the most-recent list back in the main display!

…any chance you can allow for variable widget widths? (say *that* 10 times fast…) If it could span 2 cell spaces, that’d be great…
Chris September 9, 2011 at 9:43 am
Hey Jim, thanks for the feedback. Yeah I’ll be looking at the widget width thing. Will probably allow users to specify the number of columns they want on their dashboard instead of developers specifying the number of columns a widget will take up. But I’ll see what I can come up with.
Robin September 12, 2011 at 10:33 am
Just what I needed. How can I force a panel arrangement for all new users or at least a new panel?
Chris September 12, 2011 at 11:26 am
Hey Robin, I think you might be looking for something like this: https://github.com/mrtopher/dashEE/issues/1.

That type of functionality isn’t available currently but I will be looking into it.
Musa March 25, 2012 at 12:47 am
Nice Addon. <3 this. Btw, link on comments widget are broken.
Franco July 18, 2012 at 9:59 am
Hi Chris,

thank you for putting together DashEE – it’s a terrific add-on!

I have a question: I’d like to use DashEE to get around the fact that in EE one can only create disjoint member groups.

Looking at your example on Widgets and Permissions I figured I could control the access to a page in the CP by including both the member group AND the user_id.

However, in order to do that I would have to hide or gray out some of the main tabs – without blocking the access to those sections. I have looked around for ways to do this, but I couldn’t find a good solution.

Do you have any thoughts on this? Ideally, it should be possible to create a DashEE widget that not only displays certain links but also block the access to other pages via the main CP tabs.

Your help would be greatly appreciated!

Best regards,
Franco
TR November 10, 2012 at 9:48 am
This is very helpful to streamline the CP dashboard for those “bread-and-butter” sites with less tech savvy clients. I look forward to seeing how it may improve in future versions and would willingly pay/donate for such a useful add-on.