Project Dashboard

Once your project was configured to work with Mattrbld, you and your collaborators will be taken to the dashboard whenever you open or import it on a different device. In this article you’ll learn how the dashboard is structured and how it can be customised for your project.

Layout

The dashboard consists of four separate sections, which each serve their own purpose in summarising the state of the project. These sections are:

• Card Zone: in this topmost section you will see a card informing you how many local changes are ready to be synced with the central repository and a button to do so. In addition to that, this section also houses all the sidebar entries that have their “show as card on dashboard” option enabled in their visibility options

• News and Announcements: the second section is a dynamic zone for any news and announcements relevant to the project. By default, it only contains the latest changelog of Mattrbld so you always know what version you are running, but as you’ll learn below you are free to add content to this zone as you see fit

• Recent Updates: here you’ll see all the recent updates to your project you and your collaborators synced with the central repository. Use this section to keep see what changed in between syncs

• Local Changes: the final section at the bottom of the dashboard shows a list of locally changed files that are ready to be synced using the button at the top of the dashboard. This list will update as you make modifications to your project in Mattrbld

Dashboard Settings

For the time being, the Dashboard tab in the project settings only allows you to modify the News and Announcements section of the dashboard by publishing new posts. In the future more options relating to the dashboard might become available here as new features are added to Mattrbld.

Publishing News and Announcements

To create a new post, simply click the “Add Post” button at the top of the Dashboard tab in the project settings. A panel will appear to the right (or as an overlay on devices with small screens) allowing you to specify a title, a summary and some detailed content that would be hidden behind a “read more” link if provided. Only the summary is required, as it represents the text of the announcement shown on the dashboard.

After supplying at least a summary text, the “Create” button below the input fields will become available, which you can click to create the post. During creation, the post will be time-stamped with the current date and time so that the newest posts will always show at the top of the News and Announcements section in the dashboard. Feel free to go to the dashboard using the sidebar and see how your post turned out at this stage.

Once back in the Dashboard tab in the project settings, you can edit or delete a post simply by clicking it in the list.

You can use these posts to communicate news, or important information relating to the project to your collaborators effectively. They’re also a great way to keep notes in private projects, for example a list of ideas for blog posts.

Read on if you’d like to learn more about how and where all these configuration options we have discussed in this and the previous articles are stored, or skip ahead to the article on collaboration.