Spacious ACP/Widgets

[Flitterkill]

Spacious ACP 4

Better visibility! More information! Totally Customizable!

Now includes Spacious Widgets!

Originally I wanted an ACP theme that would display more options/information on a smaller sized laptop screen (i.e. 1600x900) and provide some customization. I've now re-written Spacious to be a more well-rounded modern look rather than focusing almost exclusively on compact information display. The result is a customizeable ACP that still retains the denser information views of the older versions. Trust me, you want this.

• More compact primary and secondary menus to fit more more menu options on the screen at a time. Reduced icon sizes as well.
• Header, primary, and secondary menu background colors fully changeable.
• Header, primary, and secondary menu font colors fully changeable.
• Removes the section header background and enlarges the section title for a clean modern look.
• Margins reduced across the board, interior tab elements styled more compactly.
• Change the name of the ACP to whatever you want.
• Latest IPS news and Admins Online widgets have been altered for better display.
• Optional modern-style dashboard widget format.
• New look for ACP warnings and new version announcements are now a single alert bar you click to expand to a details modal. No more wall of text destroying the dashboard!
• Subtle animation effect when moving between ACP areas. Feels app-like!
• Other under-the-hood changes...
• New in Spacious ACP 4: Login page customization!

 

Introducing Spacious Widgets!

The Spacious ACP theme comes with bonus dashboard widgets to fill in the gaps left by the rather lackluster IPS dashboard widgets. Includes:

System Overview: Realtime server load, IPS installation size, IPS database size, memory available (or free), storage space available, options for Community in the Cload customers, and more!

Gallery Overview: Mostly a rework of the default Gallery widget but with better formatting and it now displays the four most popular images in the Gallery.

Forum Statistics: The most glaring IPS ommission. You get not only the usual topic counts but 24 hour, 7day, and 28 day lookback totals. An 8 week compact bar graph to see how your community is trending. All that again for topic responses, totalled separately from topic first posts. Top three topic starters and responders with thier respective totals. 

Member Statistics: Member count of course but inludes the 24 hour, 7 days, and 28 days members active count. See how many members are actually using your forums on a regular basis! Also counts members that have not visited your forums in over 6 months. Members online, guests online, and new members over the last 7 days as well.

System Errors: Lists last five system errors so you can actually see what problems are occuring under the hood. Direct links to error reports and system error page.

SimilarWeb: A website ranking/tracking service. Two SW default widgets for tracking visitor types and relative rankings, embedded in a single IPS dashboard widget. The rankings widget can have two additional websites added for tracking alongside your own site.

Alexa: Get your Alexa ranking (for whatever that's worth...) right in your dashboard. Both global and national. Updates on a 7 day basis and flags trending up or down from previous check.

Future Widgets? Downloads, Blogs, and Commerce will probably have "something" done in the future but it will be awhile. As far as the next new widget goes it will be a Database Health widget.

 

For a full rundown on all the widgets plus what's on tap for additional Spacious ACP and Spacious Widgets changes and addons please read the Support Topic.

 

Installation:

For Spacious ACP install the .xml file as a new theme under Customization in your ACP. Please remove any previous Spacious ACP theme you may have installed. This is a totally new re-write and you should NOT upgrade the old theme. Be sure to assign permissions for the theme to Admins only. As before, this is exclusively an ACP theme; not a front end theme. To change the Spacious ACP settings just edit the theme settings as you usually do. All the Spacious options are under the Spacious ACP tab within that area; you may edit the other options (default theme options) but they may or may not have any effect.

For Spacious Widgets install the .tar file as a new Application. All configuration of Spacious Widgets can be found under it's own menu option which you will find under the Customization tab in the ACP. This is where you can configure the System Overview widget if you are a Community in the Cloud customer, change the SimilarWeb widget settings to add up to two additional websites to track alongside yours, and change the appearance of the ACPlogin page.

To add the new widgets to your dashboard just click the add button on the dashboard, choose and then drag them where you want them to be. Be aware that both Forum and Member Statistics only support the large display widget area. All the others can be used in the large or small areas.

Support:

In the support topic. This initial release will have some quirks with responsive css on Phone view plus left-to-right language support is pretty much nil right now. Also language bits. I need to add more variables so you can at least translate some stuff in the widgets.
 

Notes:

Some of the new widgets give you a sampling of statistical information you probably want about your site and though you can request that I add some things of this nature to Spacious Widgets they will probably NOT be added as that will require storing substantial information in the database. That's well beyond the scope of an ACP theme and some addon widgets. Better off in a separate application where it can be done right.

Keep in mind that in some server/hosting situations some data I try to read for the System Overview widget may not be accessible. Do not buy this if the Server Overview widget is the only thing you are interested in. No refunds will be approved due to some elements of that widget not working correctly on your site.

 

Cost/Allowed Use:

$10/$5 every six months. Basically $10 a year once you get going for a customizable ACP and a bunch of new dashboard widgets (with more on the way!). Feel free to skip a renew if you must but if you skip more than one renewal and try to renew more than a year later and I may just have you buy it outright again. Renewals keep us devs going! Licensed for your IPS site bound to your IPS account plus any/all dev boards (localhost or otherwise). Other sites should/need to get their own licensed copy of Spacious ACP.

Click the logo to get Spacious ACP and Spacious Widgets in the IPS Marketplace:

[Flitterkill]

Spacious ACP

Nothing too out of the ordinary here. Clicking on the pencil icon for Spacious ACP in the themes list in the ACP will bring up the theme options. All the Spacious ACP options are under Spacious ACP of course. You can alter both the text color and background color for the header area and both primary and seconday ACP menus.

There is a toggle to enable/disable the modern style widgets. That's the difference between the default style...

And the new modern style (which removes the blocky header and shrinks the header text)...

The modern style uses the Roboto font for the header text. Let me know if your language doesn't have supported character set in that font (it should for most though) and I can option it out later on.

Other than that the changes are all under the hood. Tighter tab formatting. Row height and padding adjusted to be tighter getting you more information on the screen at a time. Some font formatting alterations (bold here and there), etc.

You'll notice the blocky background color section headers have been removed in favor of just enlarging the section title text. It's a much better (and cleaner) look. What can't be demonstrated too well is the animation effect. When you flip between ACP areas, the main area.

Two widgets have been altered directly in the Spacious ACP theme (and not as part of Spacious Widgets). Admins Online now has larger text and the actual admins avatar and the IPS News widget has much tighter row spacing so you can use that widget without it taking up a ton of dashboard realestate.

  

Lastly, I've improved the message alerts and the update available messages.

Regular updates have a green background. Security updates have a red background. If you skip a security update and the next update arrives as just a regular update the bar will display green, not red. To carry through the red background I would have to start tracking update types and that's a little beyond a simple theme.

Click the bar! Yes, and a modal will popup displaying all that update information that blasted away any usefullness the dashboard would have until you made the message go away by updating.

Older users of Spacious ACP will notice the old IPS link section is gone. Too many changes on the IPS side to support those hard links. Maybe I'll make an IPS support app that can bring that stuff back. Very low priority.

 

Edited October 18, 2016 by Flitterkill

[Flitterkill]

Spacious Widgets

Before diving into the widgets themselves, let me show you the options menu.

Under the cusomization tab you'll find the settings for Spacious Widgets. It may not seem intuitive but this is where you can change the ACP login page settings (not in the Spacious ACP theme settings). It was far easier to do here with the application and some hooks than using a theme and let's leave it at that.

If you want to add custom background images to the ACP login page please grab this from the Marketplace. It's free and does a fantastic job. No need for me to duplicate that work here.

What you do get though is the ability to change the background color (if not using that image addon above), change the login text, some font colors, etc. Knock yourself out.

The other settings are for the System Overview widget and the SimilarWeb widget and will be discussed later in this thread.

Widgets marked in this thread as Wide and Side will work correctly in both positions. Those marked with just wide will really work just in the wide position. This will eventually be worked around but will require a ton of css work. This is because dashboard widgets have little if anything to do with the blocks/widgets you get on the front end. Those get a variable passed through to them indicating vertical or horizontal meaning you can account for position in the widget template. Here in the dashboard, nope, which means really tough css to get around it (if even...)

Edited October 18, 2016 by Flitterkill

[EmpireKicking]

amazing, Will this be available under the marketplace as an sample version? and will it be support for the current patch?

Edited October 18, 2016 by EmpireKickass

[Flitterkill]

System Overview (wide and side views)

For this I grab meminfo and cpuinfo plus a few other things.

Server Load: Number of threads you have available to you mathed out to the actual load percentages. That's in order of 1 minute load, 5 minute load, 15 minute load. This is a live look every time you view the dashboard. If you need help with these numbers you can ask here in this thread but you may get better help in the Server forums here in the IPS forums.

Total System Memory: Keep in mind that many times these numbers are going to be conservatively rounded for display. The server used for the above screen shot has 2GB of memory but when you get the actual bit numbers it will work out to that. No worries. VPS, shared, or dedicated this is the amount of memory availabe to you.

Memory Available/Memory Free: This stat will display as one or the other depending upon what your server supports. Older servers will only display memory free which is the technically correct amount of un-used memory on your server. However, that number is somewhat misleading, and so, newer versions of memino provide memory available which is, as you can guess, the amount of memory available to be used. Long technical discussion to explain it but simply put, some memory in use is just being used becasue it can be used, not because it *must* be used and that is a critical distinction. Most server will have the up to date meminfo and will display memory available. 

IPS System Size: This is the total size of your local IPS installation. All of it. It does not pull in the size of any off-server storage. That means if you have set up a separate FTP or Amazon S3 storage for whatever, that is not being accounted for. This statistic updates every 24 hours as crawling the entire IPS installation directory is somewhat expensive.

IPS Database Size: How big your data and index are.

Server Diskspace Available: How much you have to work with. For everyone except Community in the Cloud users once this number drops to something like 5GB of space you'll get a yellow wrap warning and less than 1GB it will be red. I'll probably let you set these alert levels in a later update.

CIC users should go to the Spacious Widgets settings and toggle on the CIC user setting and then enter your quota amount. This will change the Server Diskspace Available stat to Quota Remaining and will work the same as Diskspace Available. CIC user will not get yellow/red warnings on low useage. Marked for a later update.

More details will pop out a modal giving you a bit more information (not that big of a deal) and for users wanting the straight up cpuinfo and memifo files hit the full details link.

Now for the caveats...

I can't control what your server provider allows. There may be cases where the reading of cpuinfo and meminfo are prevented. Can't help you there, sorry. Also, there may be cases where I can't crawl your IPS installation correctly due to a server setting. Might be able to get around that but I got no takers for shared hosting beta testers so here we are ...

And lastly, CIC users. You will not (or should not? I forget already...) have server load displaying as a stat. IPS staff member <NAME REDACTED> assured me that the secret Amazon sauce they use to create and load balance the CIC stuff means that the load statistic is somewhat meaningless. I've seen stunningly high and stunningly low numbers when testing on a CIC site with no real feel for impact one way or the other so I have no reason to not believe <NAME REDACTED>. To save the support crew some grief I've just pulled that stat out when you toggle on CIC user in the settings. Inquisitive minds can still find out what they use for the base Amazon cloud system and the database they use.

Enjoy!

@EmpireKickass No sample version. It works. No reason for it to ever not work unless IPS does something way drastic like blow up the theme system. And the widgets are pretty isolated from everything else; they would have to, again, blow up the dashboard widgets in a future update and then it would still be just updating to the new normal.

[Flitterkill]

Gallery Overview (Wide and Side)

Mostly a rework of the default Gallery widget but with the new style Spacious stats. The dskspace count is only the originals. That isn't indicated on the IPS Gallery widget and it should be as you may get the idea that that is the entirety of the Gallery space being used. Technically, it's correct, but every image also gets built out into large, medium, small versions but those are stored elsewhere and thier sizes not recorded in the database. 

Obviously you can see the big addition here. Four most viewed images. Yes those are linked as well. Totally responsive so feel free to use this widget wide or side. Don't have Gallery? Well, I did check for that but by all means use the widget for what good it will do you

Recent System Errors (Wide and Side)

Last five errors, linked. Errors within the last 24 hours are flagged with a red background. System logs direct link too.

Made this as I wanted to see errors as they are being thrown, not a week or two later when I get around to looking at the logs.

 

Edited October 18, 2016 by Flitterkill

[Flitterkill]

SimilarWeb (Wide and Side)

SW is one of those traffic/ranking services. These are thier two default widgets packed together in one IPS dashboard widget.

First one covers the sources of traffic to your site, the other one tracks visitor counts.

You can track two additional sites alongside your own on visitor counts. Just go to Spacious Widgets settings and add them in.

Stats will be "rough" unless you sign up and so on and so forth but they are a pretty decent starting point even without working with SimilarWeb directly.

Alexa (Wide and Side)

Your basic stock Alexa ranking (for whatever that is worth...).

I hit the API every 7 days so refreshing madly won't help you (they update on a 7 day schedule anyways). Pulls both global and national rankings. Flags up/down when it refreshes based on last value. Hit the button to go to the Alexa page for your site. No I'm not planning on storing past values for weeks on end; this is just a derpy little thing to give you something to think about.

When you first add this widget to your dashboard nothing will display. Just refresh the page to kickstart it. I used this widget to play around with using the IPS settings database as low-end CRON (instead of the IPS Tasks system) 

Don't be put off by the screenshots here. Spacious ACP allows you to toggle on/off the modern dashboard widget style. These screenshots were on the default style.

[Flitterkill]

Member Statistics (Wide)

First of the wide only widgets. The reason is the stat bar. I still need to add some css to account for phone view but that at least is doable. Side view is going to require some reworking to make it fit and I'm not sure if it is worth it honestly. Maybe I can do it all with the plain responsive css. We'll see...

Anyways... yes, Members! 

Member count plus the last 28 days (four week), last 7 days, and last 24 hours active counts. That's unique counts of course. This way you can track how many members are actually actively participating in your forums (or at least visiting a bit). 

The inactive count are the number of unique members who have not visited your site in the last 6 months. Could be a variety of reasons but more or less if gives you an idea of how much dead member weight you are carrying. It's one thing to brag about a forum with 10,000 members but not so much when only maybe 200 are active... Again, its numbers for you to think about.

Members on-line are the members publicly or anonymously on your site right now. Guests are, well, guests on-line - might/probably counts search bots too.

New member count is a simple count of new registered members over the last 7 days.

I do have some more to add on here but if you are expecting a wide ranging statistical package, don't. If you want a nice member count by week I hear you but again, not going to happen with these widgets as those numbers aren't being tracked anywhere and will require some back-end work well beyond the scope of these widgets.

 

[Flitterkill]

Forum Statistics (Wide)

Somewhat surprised we never got even a basic Forums widget out of the gate so here we go...

First up is the distinction between content, topics, posts, and responses. IPS works off of a content model/philosophy. Everything is "content" and is actually recorded as such in the members database. You have a content count and that is topics you've made, images you've posts, posts made in topics, etc. All the same pile. This matters here as I strongly believe there is a distinction to be made between topics created and posts made within those topics. So, here I have a responses statistic. Responses are all the posts that are NOT the first or topic creation posts. Your forum may have but a few people starting converstations but many responding. Maybe you take action to get people to start more converstations? Perhaps you have many topics started but few responses? Well then, get working on that problem! 

Topics: Total count. Topics made over the last 28 days, last 7 days, last 24 hours.

Responses: Same as above but just responses.

The example above comes from a small forum used as a knowledge repository and there will always be far more topics than responses so treat the above as just a pretty picture.

You've noticed the bar graphs on the right sides of course. These are the last 8 weeks of your topics and responses. Hover over each bar to get the amount created each week. I then do some derpy math to get the high mark, flag it at 100%, and graph out the others in relation. Enjoy your 8-week trend lines (read them left to right, 8 weeks out to 1 week out). Again, RTL languages I have no CSS for. Buyer beware; or hit me up with access to a site so I can work on it.

Yes, looking much further back would be more valuable but treat this as near-term information to catch trends as they happen; not the long term history of your forums. That will require far more work than I'm willing to invest in a single widget. Also, don't yell at me for my great and grand bar graphing abilities. I LOVE D3 and svg drawn graphs and dashboards and all that but I'm not gonna start pulling javascrpt libraries and doing that sort of work for just a widget or two. Besdies, I have divs, and background colors, and css transform? What else do I need  One tiny quirk here with this method. Any weekly value that actually would be zero I have to display as 1px high otherwise the bar won't display. Told you this was derpy!

What else we got? The usual counts. Forums with most topics. Forum with most posts. These are all linked by the way (opens in a new tab).

Top three topic starters and top three responders. I think I'll add in a... hmmm... 2 week?...4 week?... lookback for these so you can see who's performing now rather than all-time. I'll still leave these here of course or hide them with a popup modal under a more details button.

Lastly there is a highest repped post link. The link text is for the topic but the link goes to the post itself. That was by request though you can now find a better front end widget in the Marketplace I believe.

[Flitterkill]

Finally got someone with "shared" hosting to test this against.

I say "shared" as if you are using a control panel of some sort to set up everything on your server many times the way you configure websites ends up being as if you are running a shared hosting situation. Same difference.

So, update to widgets is forthcoming (next 24 hours) that tightens up a few things.

System Overview Widget:

1) open_basedir. A giant pain in the ... Those of you that are on true shared hosting will probably run into this problem. If you see undetected for some of the variables in this widget you probably have this problem. If this is enabled on your server (shared or otherwise) I will not be able to read in meminfo or cpuinfo at all. Centos/Red Hat/Ubuntu these "files" exist in /proc. You will need to add /proc in the open_basedir bit in... php.ini, httpd.conf, or other places depending upon how your server is set up. Those of you using VestaCP will need to edit the configuration templates, then rebuild the website in the control panel, and restart Apache, etc. Everyone will need to restart Apache/etc... when you change these settings. 

2) Same problem with pulling diskfreespace as that makes an open_basedir check. Since this is just a check of free space available I changed the directory it hits to make the check from / to your IPS default directory. Gets the same result; bypasses the problem completely. 

Edited October 20, 2016 by Flitterkill

[Foolboy]

Hi. I just bought your ACP widget/theme and love it! Thank you very much for bringing these pretty neat feature to my ACP.

However, I would like some help from you regarding to the system overview widget: Although you already stated that you will not give a refund for this widget display problem (and I accept that), this issue I encountering on my community's ACP right now should not occurred like this. I currently running my community of a fully managed VPS (LAMP Managed by Directadmin on CentOS 6.1) with root access and have no clue why your widget is unable to retrieve these information from my server.  Can you help me on this?

Also, I could not added a third site to be compared on SimilarWeb. It is already added in the setting but did not showed on the widget. Tried to clear cache and even restart VPS with no luck...

Edited October 20, 2016 by Foolboy

[Flitterkill]

Hitting the sack now. The update will fix some of the system overview problems. Might need to fix the open_basedir stuff on your server. If you could pm me acp access I'll get on this in the morning.

[Foolboy]

1 hour ago, Flitterkill said:

Might need to fix the open_basedir stuff on your server. If you could pm me acp access I'll get on this in the morning.

If this is about changing my open_basedir variable on the php.ini, can you guide me what value I need to include instead? Will this issue resolve if I add "/proc" into this variable? Thank you.

I currently using PHP 7.0.11 and below is the value currently set on the open_basedir variable of my hosting:

/home/mywebsite/:/tmp:/var/tmp:/usr/local/lib/php/:/usr/local/php70/lib/php/

 

[EmpireKicking]

IPS should consider add this to the next update for all people to use, Damn this is an cool plugin to have. And I'm still waiting to get my income to get it  

[Flitterkill]

@Foolboy Yes, just add /proc and that will fix the meminfo and cpuinfo pulls.

Update later this afternoon will fix diskspace display.

Just starting the SImilarWeb fix now.

[Flitterkill]

So can you test again? It's working here. What sites were you trying to add? I should have probably mentioned this but if your site (or a site you are trying to track against) has no SW stats due to low traffic volume then nothing will be displayed. In this example, you can see the top SW embed shows the IPS site has super-low traffic so it isn't being tracked. In the second SW embed beneath, since this IPS site doesn't have any stats, it isn't being displayed at all. The other two sites I added are being displayed however.

Also, the sites you choose, if one of them has traffic magitudes above the others, the graph will look like it has a single line up top (for the big site) and the other one or two will be buried at the bottom. Here, let me swap out slashdot.org for google.com...

Arstechnica has 30-ish million views a month. Drop in the bucket compared to Google's 15+billion... 

Edited October 20, 2016 by Flitterkill

[Flitterkill]

Just updated the download for Spacious Widgets. Just grab the tar file from the Marketplace and then choose upload a new version from the app controls for SW in the Applications area of your ACP.

Only two things. Those of you with open_basedir problems still need to allow /proc for pulling cpuinfo and meminfo information but this update fixes any problems with open_basedir and reading how much diskspace you have remaining.

The other thing is I added some better text to the full details link. All that does is displays the entire contents of cpuinfo and meminfo. Now if you have the open_basedir problem I mention what you need to do rather than just say undetected. Again, this is in the full details link; the widget itself will still say undetected in those areas.

I still (one day) have to go through this and add language vars instead of leaving a lot of this stuff hardcoded...

[Foolboy]

9 hours ago, Flitterkill said:

@Foolboy Yes, just add /proc and that will fix the meminfo and cpuinfo pulls.

Update later this afternoon will fix diskspace display.

Just starting the SImilarWeb fix now.

Hello @Flitterkill,

I added /proc into the open_basedir value and it did fixed the issue. Thank you very much.

I also confirm your recommendation on configuring the site on SM and it is now showing all three sites as it should be. Thank you again.

However, when I upgrade the new widget version to my community's application. I am unable to access AdminCP's dashboard anymore. It's showing HTTP 500 error. I have to disable/uninstall your widget to gain access again. Please help.

 

[Flitterkill]

I'll need ACP access for this. PM me pls.

(Although there is a tiny bug in the new version. Doubt it is causing your problems though...)

Edited October 21, 2016 by Flitterkill

[Foolboy]

8 minutes ago, Flitterkill said:

I'll need ACP access for this. PM me pls.

(Although there is a tiny bug in the new version. Doubt it is causing your problems though...)

Sending to you now. Please note that this issue is occuring on the ACP of admin who is already dragged out your widget into the dashboard (like mine).

The admin account that I sent to you did not encountered this problem yet.

[Flitterkill]

Perfect. Looking now (or when I get the pm that is...)

Edited October 21, 2016 by Flitterkill

[EmpireKicking]

to get this straight that the next update will have that shared hosting option fixed?

[Flitterkill]

Well, there's nothng to "fix" per se... If your server has open_basedir set in php.ini it needs to allow /proc to be read otherwise I can't get at the memory and cpu info files. 

Now if there is a bug, it's that I might be caught out in recent IPS changes in how they make apps handle versioning. And that will be taken care of when I bite the bullet, update my dev install, and set a new version number on the file.

[ZakRhyno]

Nice Addon

Edited October 25, 2016 by ZakRhyno

[Flitterkill]

Sounds like you got it figured out.

spacious_acp.xml = theme

spaciouswidgets.tar = app