Searching for EE4 replacements for Zenbu & Hokoku

Did you find a solution for this?

No I didn’t, unfortunately. I wrote to the developer and he said he is working on EE4 versions. He said that potentially Zenbu could be released by EEConf and then Hokoku would come after, but there’s no definite timeline at this point.

Can you help us understand the business need that results in these two workflows being necessary on the latest version of v4? What’s the big picture that this functionality is solving? The more detail you can provide the better. That will help us in planning for future native feature. Thanks!

We also use Zenbu. And the purpose for this is to customize the channel entry list. We have a couple of large sites with a variety of content structures (ranging from blog entries, e-comerce products, back-end admin tools, and workflow tracking). So, we use Zenbu to adjust the view of the channel entries list by adding additional columns. We add columns for product thumbnails, categories, etc.

For product entry lists (we use Store), we display the SKU and price.

For internal back-end admin tools (used for member/client management, and others), we display other custom field data like last staff contact, request pending, etc.

And, with Zenbu, we can save custom searches in the channel entries list so we can easily just view items that require action (based on status, or other custom field).

For an e-commerce site, or a workflow site, this type of interface control on the channel entries lists has been essential for us.

On our site, we rely on Zenbu’s ability to combine filters and also to search by any custom field. One channel we have is for alumni profiles, and those profiles will have various fields including their graduation year, degree received, and current work information. Some example searches we use include finding all PhD Graduates from the 2000’s (filtering for an exact match on the degree field and then a “begins with” filter on the year field), graduates from a specific year who are missing current work information (combining an exact match filter on the year field and an “is empty” filter on their current job title), or either of those with the extra constraint of if the alumnus is still local to our school.

We also do have front ends in place for this channel using Low Search, but Zenbu is nice for our content editors to adapt these searches as they need and also to be able to save and reload past searches. I believe Zenbu has more search modes also: contains, begins with, ends with, does not contain, does not begin with, does not end with, is, is not, is empty, is not empty. Following that same vein, Hokoku exports are nice for the managers to save the filtered results and work with them outside the control panel (like if they needed to craft an email blast out to a subset of alumni for example).

If this were to be integrated into core, one request I’ve heard is the ability to have different modes for combining search filters. Right now, all filters are implicitly “and”-ed together so all the results must satisfy all the filters (low search has this behavior too I believe). The ability to use “or” instead would be helpful. For example, if we wanted to see alumni from a given year in a subset of degree programs (but not all), we would have to do separate searches for the desired programs and combine the results afterwards since we can’t “and” two filters on the degree received field (there would be no results found).

Thank you both for the details, much appreciated!