I introduced my first 4 Editors to the MODx Manager interface 2 days ago; by observing their first trials I noticed that they all have great difficulties in locating the Save button on the top of the page; they keep looking for it either below the editing textarea, or inside the FCK/TyneMCE button bars, even after being instructed to scroll back-up.
I do have a problem myself with this setting, and I believe it would immediately be flagged by a usability expert for violating a few of the ’good design’ principles stated by the 3 ’gurus’ David Norman’ -’Jacob Nielsen’ - ’David Krug’
BAD MAPPING: functions and related controls should be visually connected, by means of proximity, color etc
INTERFACE should not break emerging conventions of the media, and things that users are accostumed to ...
can we have a [Save] - [Cancel] - [duplicate] buttons-bar below the editing area ??! ...just like it is in this Forum interface!!
-
MODX Staff
- 12,272 Posts
I completely agree there needs to be a change, but it won’t be in 095. But the 095 manager is just a stepping stone to a much more extensive manager overhaul in general. Buttons will likely become a fixed bar at the top of every page.
Many times content editors might want to just change the metadata about a page (title or introtext, for example). If it’s a page with lots of TVs, then they’d need to scroll all the way to the bottom. By having a fixed button bar at the top that doesn’t scroll out of the way (and perhaps it should be at the bottom), it might be a good compromise. What’s your thoughts there? (and the buttons need to look more like buttons, too!)
Ryan Thrash, MODX Co-Founder
Follow me on Twitter at @rthrash or catch my occasional unofficial thoughts at thrash.me
To have save buttons at the bottom (which are, as Ryan says, underneath TVs and thus potentially as far from the content area as the top is), install:
http://modxcms.com/BottomButtonBar-807.html
This comes with 0.9.5.
always visible (no scrolling) would be good enough I guess
position: fixed; in the css for the <Div> containing the buttons would suffice; I believe IE7 finally support this, IE6 users will have to scroll and hopefully convince themselves to upgrade or better to switch to Firefox..
BTW this would be the way to go to get rid of frames for the whole Manager !
... but at that point you’d also have to clean up all <TABLE> layouts, are we talking 1.what for such things?
