How to improve the menu item workflow to make it easier for Joomla! users? This is one of the Google Summer of Code 2016 projects in course now and this article shows its progress.

In my previous article: Helping out Yash by Improving Joomla Menu Item workflow , I wrote about a scenario which showed how a new Joomler (who I named Yash) may get confused while making a menu item for an article, contact or any other component. During my summer break I worked on this project and now I will be writing about current status of my project, the hurdles I faced in my project and what I will be accomplishing in the coming days.

Phase 1:

After the community bonding time was over, I dived into the coding part of the project. The first instructions that we got from our Joomla team lead Puneet Kala is to set the Coding standards (PHPCS) for Joomla in the IDE we are using. I faced difficulty while setting up the coding standards for joomla in my IDE as the instruction given in the documentation were little old. I improved the documentation and set the coding standards correctly on my workstation for windows. The documentation can be accessed via: Joomla Code Sniffer Doc. In the first meeting with my mentors (Gunjan Patel and Peter Martin) we decided to have a weekly meeting every Tuesday. After that we discussed what should be the first goal to set for this project. After discussing we came to conclusion that an on-the fly version of the improving menu item workflow for the com_content component. The work on this functionality can be tracked via this PR: On-the-fly version PR

Phase 2:

The next phase was all about making the functionality developed in phase 1 generic, so that other components can also use the functionality. My mentors asked me to investigate different approaches of making the functionality more generic. I found different approaches and after discussing the advantages & disadvantages of different methods I chose to make the functionality available via a Plugin. The work on the Plugin can be tracked via this PR: Plugin PR

Demo:

Demo of the above plugin can be seen via this video:

Work Completed:

• Making an on-the fly version of Improving menu item workflow functionality.
• Creating new fields in the edit view of any component form via plugin.
• Saving the menu item from the newly created tab of new fields via plugin.
• Retrieving the previously saved menu item in the edit view form of the component via plugin.

Work To Be Completed:

• Creating new options in the plugin to define what extensions are allowed to make use of the new functionality.
• The automatic suggestion of menu title and menu alias on the basis of edit form title and alias.
• Editing the previously created menu item via plugin.

Meeting is scheduled with the mentors periodically and every meeting report is also published. The work done and problem faced during each week can be know via these reports which can can be accessed via this link : Reports on the meetings held

To the Joomla Community:

I would like to thank my mentors Peter Martin and Gunjan Patel to help me throughout the coding period till now and whenever I faced any difficulty. And in the end I would love to thanks the amazing Joomla community of which I am also a part now.