by
Dave Burke
10. February 2012 17:55
A quick update for you as our date with Sueetie Version 4.0 Destiny approaches. We’re currently applying all of the v4.0 updates to the Lollipop Theme, and that’s a lot of updates. There were so many, in fact, that we considered scrapping Lollipop and building off the current Parfait v4.0-compliant theme used at Sueetie.com. We decided to stay with Lollipop as the v4.0 default theme for tradition sake, and because it gives us a chance to make it better.
First stop on the Lollipop Express was the Administration area. The Admin area uses Lollipop by default, so we really didn’t have to make any changes at all. Still, there was an opportunity to pretty things up a bit and apply some of the newer stylings throughout the area for consistency. We also felt there should be a little less, um, red. Here’s what the v4.0 Sueetie Administration area looks like.
Not significantly different, and many of you might be more excited by the “Sueetie Version 4.0.4423.25634” display than anything in the aesthetic realm. That build label is actually pretty great, cause it means that all of the Sueetie source is in 4.0 feature lockdown mode and successfully running under v4.0’s new licensing logic.
Not Just Administrative Cosmetics
While we were reviewing Sueetie Administration, we realized we were using the same UI code in the Membership Admin area since the beginning. DataGridView controls mainly, with a good bit of overhead to handle paging. And we had no real-time filtering capability or column sorting. That’s all behind us now, as all of the primary User Management tables were scrapped and rewritten to use the Datatables jQuery Plugin that we love and use in several other locations. Here’s a screenshot of the Registered Users table, now using Datatables.
We didn’t remove any of the functionality like being able to deactivate one or more users, or jump to users whose username starts with a certain letter. But we added real-time column sorting, data filtering across all fields, and configurable table row length display.
We have also been making good progress on updating Lollipop outside of the Admin area. Hopefully you’ll like the stylistic changes in your Sueetie Version 4.0 Lollipop.
More as it happens on the Lollipop Express.
Dave is the founder of Sueetie and its Head Ice Cream Dipper. Dave has been building
online applications since 1994 when he installed his first web server while an Assistant
Professor at East Carolina University. He left Academia in 1995 to focus in online
development for business where he worked with both publicly and privately held companies.
Dave lives in Burlington, Vermont where he has worked out of his home office as
a freelance developer and online community consultant since 2000. Reach him at daveburke@dbvt.com. You can visit his website
at dbvt.com. You can also .