Dashboard Widgets

[humptydumpty]

I'm looking for a faster way to monitor my Cloudrons. @robi suggested keyboard navigation in this thread and then the idea of widgets occurred to me as that might also help in my use-case.

Proposal:

• Ability to have custom widgets on the dashboard. For instance, add system and specific app graphs for monitoring (Paperless with its recurring 100% CPU usage bug).

Widgets can be related to any system or app settings which will aid to either accessing the main page faster or let you edit it from the widget directly. For instance, if you often add aliases to your email, that's multiple clicks and sub-paths to go through.

[ekevu123]

That sounds to me like a lot of work just to save a few clicks.

How about instead of having to open the top menu to navigate into a submenu, something like quick icons instead to go into the respective menu directly?

[humptydumpty]

@ekevu123 said in Dashboard Widgets:

a lot of work just to save a few clicks

It is if you have one or two Cloudrons. I have three and I'm starting to feel the pain of the service providers on here. Your solution covers the main settings menu only - not apps. Robi's keyboard navigation would be the smoothest approach until we have proper built-in monitoring tools and a better UI. If full widget support is impractical, showing the server stats and mini-graphs in a top/bottom bar would also work. Think of a car's dashboard with all its gauges and lights, or HWINFO's taskbar widgets if you're into hardware and temp monitoring.

The way I see it, Cloudron manages my server and I have to manage Cloudron and there's no "command center" that's going to help me win the war. If my ship stops moving, I need to run to the engine room to see what's wrong. I think we can do better.

Rant: I can't code so maybe I'm way off here. But, I see all these apps and platforms trying to reinvent the wheel with the common things that they all need (whether it's frontend or backend stuff) and non of it is uniform across sites. Why can't they be like operating systems? Ctrl+V is paste whether it's Linux, Windows, or Mac (command or wtv it's called for them, but essentially the same). I feel like the digital world is still the "old west" and everyone is trying to figure things out.

[humptydumpty]

If you use Bitwarden, you're familiar with the ability to create custom fields and specify the title and then the value of it. You can do the same in Noco to build the table to fit your needs, and so on. I always thought there's some framework that devs use that would let us users do the same in any app/interface.

I use WP Cost Estimation & Payment Forms Builder (its on envato) to build a custom order form for my website. It's pretty cool because I can have math and conditional values and no coding skills needed. The concept is similar to Bitwarden's create your own custom field thing so you define it all through steps and connect the steps together like a diagram maker. I wish the web was like that. Sigh. Rant's done. Back to work.

[robi]

There were other threads discussing Dashboards on top of Cloudron, so you can make your own links to the common things you visit to manage your infrastructure.

I think the resistance at this time for the CL team is Multi-Cloudron which will manage multiple servers under one dashboard, which is understandable.

Keyboard nav still stands on its own in both scenarios.

I would however encourage the community to experiment with other solutions until then. Even if you end up using a Linktr.ee clone to make your own dash. Or have an AI design one for you, including CL API functions. Fun.

[humptydumpty]

@robi said in Dashboard Widgets:

Keyboard nav still stands on its own in both scenarios.

Exactly. I wish they look into this soon.

Now that you mention it, creating an html page with the proper links and having it pinned in the browser would definitely help. Thanks for the tip