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Flex Objects Plugin

About

The Flex Objects Plugin is for Grav CMS. Flex objects is a powerful new plugin that allows you to build custom collections of objects, which can modified by CRUD operations via the admin plugin to easily manage large sets of data that don't make sense as simple YAML configuration files, or Grav pages. These objects are defined by blueprints written in YAML and they are rendered by a set of twig files. Additionally both objects and collections can be customized by PHP classes, which allows you to define complex behaviors and relationships between the objects.

System Requirements

Plugin requires Grav v1.7.25 or later version in order to run. Additionally you need Form Plugin v5.1.0 and optionally Admin Plugin v1.10.25 or later version.

Installation

Typically a plugin should be installed via GPM (Grav Package Manager):

$ bin/gpm install flex-objects

Alternatively it can be installed via the Admin Plugin

Sample Data

Once installed you can either create entries manually, or you can copy the sample data set:

$ mkdir -p user/data/flex-objects
$ cp user/plugins/flex-objects/data/flex-objects/contacts.json user/data/flex-objects/contacts.json

Configuration

This plugin works out of the box, but provides several fields that make modifying and extending this plugin easier:

enabled: true

built_in_css: true
extra_admin_twig_path: 'theme://admin/templates'
admin_list:
  per_page: 15
  order:
    by: updated_timestamp
    dir: desc

directories:
  - 'blueprints://flex-objects/contacts.yaml'
  - 'blueprints://flex-objects/pages.yaml'
  - 'blueprints://flex-objects/user-accounts.yaml'
  - 'blueprints://flex-objects/user-groups.yaml'

Simply edit the Flex Objects plugin options in the Admin plugin, or copy the flex-objects.yaml default file to your user/config/plugins/ folder and edit the values there. Read below for more help on what these fields do and how they can help you modify the plugin.

Most interesting configuration option is directories, which contains list or blueprint files which will define the flex types.

Displaying

just create a page called flex-objects.md or set the template of your existing page to template: flex-objects. This will use the flex-objects.html.twig file provided by the plugin.

---
title: Directory
flex:
  directory: contacts
---

# Directory Example

If you do not specify flex.directory name in the page header, the page will list all directories instead of displaying entries from a single directory.

Modifications

This plugin is configured with a sample contacts directory with a few sample fields:

  • published
  • first_name
  • last_name
  • email
  • website
  • tags

These are probably not the exact fields you might want, so you will probably want to change them. This is pretty simple to do with Flex Objects, you just need to change the Blueprints and the Twig Templates. This can be achieved simply enough by copying some current files and modifying them.

Let's assume you simply want to add a new "Phone Number" field to the existing Data and remove the "Tags". These are the steps you would need to perform:

  1. Copy the blueprints/flex-objects/contacts.yaml Blueprint file to another location, let's say user/blueprints/flex-objects/. The file can really be stored anywhere, but if you are using admin, it is best to keep the blueprint file where admin can automatically find it.

!!! NOTE: If you want to put the blueprints to user/themes/yourtheme/blueprints, you need to use the new blueprint folder structure from Grav 1.7. See Plugin/Theme Blueprints.

  1. Edit the user/blueprints/flex-objects/contacts.yaml like so:

    title: Contacts
description: Simple contact directory with tags.
type: flex-objects

config:
  admin:
    list:
      title: name
      fields:
        published:
          field:
            type: toggle
            label: Publ
          width: 8
        last_name:
          link: edit
        first_name:
          link: edit
        email:
        phone:
  data:
    storage:
        class: 'Grav\Framework\Flex\Storage\SimpleStorage'
        options:
          formatter:
            class: 'Grav\Framework\File\Formatter\JsonFormatter'
          folder: user-data://flex-objects/contacts.json

form:
  validation: loose

  fields:
    published:
      type: toggle
      label: Published
      highlight: 1
      default: 1
      options:
        1: PLUGIN_ADMIN.YES
        0: PLUGIN_ADMIN.NO
      validate:
        type: bool
        required: true

    last_name:
      type: text
      label: Last Name
      validate:
        required: true

    first_name:
      type: text
      label: First Name

    email:
      type: email
      label: Email Address
      validate:
        required: true

    website:
      type: url
      label: Website URL
      
    phone:
      type: text
      label: Phone Number

    See how we replaced tags: with phone: in the config.admin.list.fields section at the top. Also, notice how we removed the tags: Blueprint field definition, and added a simple text field for phone:. If you have questions about available form fields, check out the extensive documentation on the subject.

  2. We need to copy the frontend Twig file and modify it to add the new "Phone" field. By default your theme already has its templates, so we can take advantage of it 2. We'll simply copy the user/plugins/flex-objects/templates/flex/contacts/object/default.html.twig file to user/themes/quark/templates/flex/contacts/object/default.html.twig. Notice, there is no reference to admin/ here, this is site template, not an admin one. We are also assuming you are using Quark theme, so you may have to change this to reference the theme you are using.

  3. Edit the default.html.twig file you just copied so it has these modifications:

    <div class="entry-details">
    {% if object.website %}
        <a href="{{ object.website }}"><span class="name">{{ object.last_name }}, {{ object.first_name }}</span></a>
    {% else %}
        <span class="name">{{ object.last_name }}, {{ object.first_name }}</span>
    {% endif %}
    {% if object.email %}
        <p><a href="mailto:{{ object.email }}" class="email">{{ object.email }}</a></p>
    {% endif %}
    {% if object.phone %}
        <p class="phone">{{ object.phone }}</p>
    {% endif %}
</div>

    Notice, we removed the entry-extra DIV, and added a new if block with the Twig code to display the phone number if set.

  4. We also need to tweak the JavaScript initialization which provides which hooks up certain classes to the search. To do this we need to copy the user/plugins/flex-objects/templates/flex/contacts/collection/default.html.twig file to user/themes/quark/templates/flex/contacts/collection/default.html.twig. Notice this is the collection template this time, not the object template as we copied before.

    Edit this file and replace the <script></script> tag at the bottom with this code:

    <script>
    var options = {
        valueNames: [ 'name', 'email', 'website', 'phone' ]
    };    
    var userList = new List('flex-objects', options);
</script>

File Upload

To upload files you can use the file form field. The standard features apply, and you can simply edit your custom blueprint with a field definition similar to:

    item_image:
      type: file
      label: Item Image
      random_name: true
      destination: 'user/data/flex-objects/files'
      multiple: true

In order to fully take advantage of image uploads, you should always be using FolderStorage, meaning that the objects get saved to individual folders together with the images. Other storage layers may or may not support media.

Advanced

You can radically alter the structure of the contacts.json data file by making major edits to the contacts.yaml blueprint file. However, it's best to start with an empty contacts.json if you are making wholesale changes or you will have data conflicts. Best to create your blueprint first. Reloading a New Entry until the form looks correct, then try saving, and check to make sure the stored user/data/flex-objects/contacts.json file looks correct.

Then you will need to make more widespread changes to the site Twig templates. You might need to adjust the number of columns and the field names. You will also need to pay attention to the JavaScript initialization in each template.

Features

Here are the main benefits of using Flex objects:

  • CRUD is automatically handled for you by Flex Objects plugin
  • Objects can be stored using many different strategies, including single file, file per object or folder per object; using yaml, json etc.
  • Flex types can be easily extended by custom PHP collection and object classes
  • Both Flex objects and collections know how to render themselves: echo $object->render($layout, $context) or {% render object layout: layout with context %}
  • You can easily create custom layouts for your objects and collections to be used in different pages
  • Both Flex objects and collections support serialization and json_encode()
  • Flex objects support Grav Medium objects with few lines of code
  • Flex objects can have relations to other Flex objects with few lines of code defining the relation
  • Flex directories support indexes which allow searching objects without loading all of them
  • Efficient caching for indexes, searches, objects and rendered output

Limitations and future improvements

Right now there are a few limitations:

  • Frontend only has a basic routing for the individual pages (you need to do the advanced routing manually by yourself)
  • Administration needs more features like filtering, bulk updates etc
  • It would be nice to have an easy way to display Flex admin in other admin plugins (it is already possible, but not easy)
  • Optional database storage layer would be nice to have
  • We need general collection functions to do simple filtering, like: "display all published items" without custom PHP code

Notes:

  1. You can actually use pretty much any folder under the user/ folder of Grav. Simply edit the Extra Admin Twig Path option in the flex-objects.yaml file. It defaults to theme://admin/templates which means it uses the default theme's admin/templates/ folder if it exists.
  2. You can use any path for front end Twig templates also, if you don't want to put them in your theme, you can add an entry in the Extra Site Twig Path option of the flex-objects.yaml configuration and point to another location.

Tricks and tips

  • You can enable and disable directories from Plugins > Flex Objects
    • New Flex Directories can be registered by simply creating a new blueprint file in user/blueprints/flex-objects folder
    • You can also add types from your plugins by hooking into onFlexInit event (see AccountsServiceProvider in Grav)
  • To properly create your own custom types, you need at least the object blueprint and the template files for collections and objects
  • Use flex-objects.md page to create entry point for your own directory
    • In page header you can use nested flex.directory variable to define the directory (or do it in admin)
    • In Admin you can just select the directory under the page title

Parameters supported by Flex page type:

---
title: 'Flex Directories'
flex:
    directories:
        layout: default
        list:
            - accounts
            - contacts        
---

directories.layout: uses template file templates/flex-objects/directories/[LAYOUT].html.twig directories.list: list of flex directories displayed in this page