Version 4 had no single place to see everything you’d built. Forms lived behind one button, templates behind another, feeds behind a third. If you wanted to jump from editing a form to checking the view that displays its data, you closed one screen and opened another.
We’ve already covered the global search functionality. The Explorer is for those that need to browse for their file. It’s a sidebar that slides in from the left and stays open while you work, so your forms, views, feeds, and projects are always a click or two away from whatever you’re editing.
Opening it
Click the icon at the top-left of the Control Panel toolbar, or press Ctrl+B (Cmd+B on a Mac).
You can also jump straight into a specific tab from the Dashboard — each of the Projects, Forms, Views, and Feeds cards has a button that opens Explorer right to that type.
Once the explorer sidebar is open, it stays open. Dismiss it with the X in the top-right corner when you want the room back.
Bonus Tip!: You may not need to close the explorer. Hover your mouse over the right border of the explorer and you’ll be able to resize the panel, giving you control over how much screen real estate the panel occupies.
Four tabs, one panel
Explorer is organized into four tabs: Projects, Forms, Views, and Feeds. Forms, Views, and Feeds each show a flat, searchable list of that resource type. Projects look different because a project isn’t a single resource — it’s a container for other resources, so it’s shown as a hierarchical tree you can expand to see what’s inside. That’s the same tree covered in the Projects post.
Every tab has a search box that filters by name as you type. They also have a set of filters underneath: scope (Portal, Global, or both), whether items are in-use on the site (Forms and Views only), and, for forms, whether the form is built with the Form Builder or is a custom coded form. Of course, you can also sort items by name or creation/modification date.
Knowing what’s actually in use
Forms and views that are wired into a live XMod Pro module show a green dot next to their name in the list. That’s your at-a-glance answer to “is anyone using this,” without opening the file first.
If you want more than the dot, the context menu has a View Usage option. It lists every page where that form or view is configured for use, each one a link you can click to go straight there. If a resource isn’t in use anywhere, that option is grayed out, because there’s nothing to show.
Opening and managing resources
Click anything in any of the four lists and it opens in a tab, the same tabbed editing covered in an earlier post. In Projects, you already know you can open a whole project or a whole type group at once — that behavior lives here in Explorer too, since Explorer is where the Projects tree actually is.
Every item, in every tab, also has a context menu. Click the vertical ellipsis button or simply right-click. It gives you Open, Pin, Rename, Duplicate, Add to Project, View Usage (when applicable), Move to Global, and Delete. You may find other resource-specific actions here. For instance, for Form Builder forms, you can convert the item to a custom form from its context menu.
Explorer is in the public beta now. If you’re a current XMod Pro customer, grab it from the Downloads section and try it on a test site. The announcement post has the requirements, the 90-day expiry, and how to report what you find.
Discuss the Beta