Hi. I’m going through the passenger app tutorials and I have my app loading. One of the next steps was for styling the app.
There was a topic in 2022 about rendering the dashboard navbar and stylesheets within a passenger app. In that topic, Travis said:
For something like this you won’t be able to get that navbar like the dashboard has unless it is an actual dashboard app.
How do we make an app an “actual dashboard” app?
I recall Travis talking about the dashboard in the GOOD 25 contributor presentation. Is this section of the contributor guide what he means by “an actual dashboard” app?
The TLDR is basically you’re adding functionality to the dashboard and that may look & feel like a separate application to the admin even if it’s not.
You may have been around long enough to have seen this - the file editor, files and active-jobs applications used to be separate Rails applications. Separate from the dashboard. I.e., they had their own boot stack and code base.
This is no longer the case, and every page those old code bases use to have are now being served from the dashboard application. So really what we’re saying is add functionality to the dashboard application BUT make it feel like it's another application to the admins.
So the file editor’s functionality is now within the dashboard, it’s no longer a separate application, but administrators can still disable it as if it were a separate application by chmoding that /var/www/ood/apps/sys/file-editor
Here’s a snippet of dashboard code to determine whether or not to show the file editor.
That makes sense. I was hoping to “add functionality to the dashboard application BUT make it feel like it’s another application to the admins” as I want to test my app without potentially mucking up the actual dashboard.
I’ll give this a shot. Thanks Jeff!