Rethinking the UI Layout + Enabling Configurable Sections for Patient Dashboards + Improving Workflows

Continuing the discussion from [Discussion] Reference Application 2.6 Roadmap for April 28, 2017 Release: looking at implementation of https://issues.openmrs.org/browse/RA-1286 and also this question Publishing Event Alerts to Patient Dashboard + New Sections in Layout

There is a general need to provide ability to easily control and configure different sections of the Reference Application. So I am wondering from those who do web design, what options are there for using templates that can provide this foundation feature.

I am going to use the Patient dashboard in this case

  1. How can new sections be added without touching the controller code.

  2. Does using the App Framework as a templating tool in conjunction with the UI framework, introduce too much complexity into it? As it may require to have functions like ability to extend apps and app templates

  3. For those who do web design more often, are there tools and libraries that can be introduced to provide JSON-like configuration for UI components? This problem may also influence the Form Designer work being done by AMPATH and Bahmni…

  4. Can the same templating approach be leveraged for both the serverside (gsp pages) and client side (Angular/React) templates?

Waiting to hear your thoughts and input