Plugins SDK: Sidebar Wishlist

[nroth]

(Mod note: This post was split from another one to become its own feature request).

Continuing the discussion from Sidebar Field Extension:

@nroth

Wishlist

• More dato-styled react components or at least maybe a theme that can be applied to some framework (shadcn, mantine, etc) to provide more components with consistent styling. It seems unreasonable to create all components every needed, so having a theme that applies to a commonly used framework would be a big help.
• Ability to programmatically open a full sidebar. For a moment I considered supporting opening the full hubspot record in a sidebar if you want to go see the full thing, but didn’t notice a method to do this.
• Ability to control whether the sidebar panel is expanded or collapsed (rather than just the initial state) or even visible. Ideally I only want it visible and/or expanded when i’m trying to render something. It seems like after I’ve expanded it one time, it stays expanded until i manually collapse it.
• The data model to configure this plugin ended up being rather complex to support reordering the sections, adding/deleting them, etc. However, if I could have created a dato model and leveraged the built-in UI for configuring the plugin, leveraging the field types, blocks, etc, it would be way less work to defer to that instead. However, the plugin configuration must be static and can’t be fetched dynamically, so doing this would be kind of awkward to manage. So, I had to implement a custom form handler to define my plugin config schema.

[roger]

Great requests! Please vote for it at the top left

I just wanted to address a few of them in particular:

@nroth

More dato-styled react components or at least maybe a theme that can be applied to some framework (shadcn, mantine, etc) to provide more components with consistent styling. It seems unreasonable to create all components every needed, so having a theme that applies to a commonly used framework would be a big help.

I would very much like to see this too.

@nroth

Ability to programmatically open a full sidebar. For a moment I considered supporting opening the full hubspot record in a sidebar if you want to go see the full thing, but didn’t notice a method to do this.

You can do this. This is what the “sidebar” is, vs a “sidebar panel”: Sidebars and sidebar panel | Documentation — DatoCMS

For a physically/visually bigger integration, though, consider opening a custom modal: Custom pages | Documentation — DatoCMS

Or even take over a whole page:

Custom pages | Documentation

@nroth

The data model to configure this plugin ended up being rather complex to support reordering the sections, adding/deleting them, etc. However, if I could have created a dato model and leveraged the built-in UI for configuring the plugin, leveraging the field types, blocks, etc, it would be way less work to defer to that instead. However, the plugin configuration must be static and can’t be fetched dynamically, so doing this would be kind of awkward to manage. So, I had to implement a custom form handler to define my plugin config schema.

Not quite sure I understand this to sufficient detail. Could you please explain?