System Site Motto

It would be useful to have another field in the system settings right after site name; site motto

as in the slashdot motto, "news for nerds, stuff that matters"

then you could just insert it where you like, as you can with [(site_name)]

Quote from: sottwell at Aug 23, 2005, 02:22 PM

It would be useful to have another field in the system settings right after site name; site motto

as in the slashdot motto, "news for nerds, stuff that matters"

then you could just insert it where you like, as you can with [(site_name)]

I’ve been thinking about things like this. I think this is a dangerous road to start down as I could see us adding a ton of fields to the configuration that may or may not get used. I’ve been thinking that a better option might be to be able to define "global TVs" that would have only one value for the whole site instead of having a per-page value. This could be very handy for Template settings and other things. You could add all sorts of things like like site motto, site logo, background color, featured article, etc. It would basically be just like a chunk except with a TV’s input and output options instead of straight HTML. The values could even be stored in the settings table and referenced via [(setting_name)] like any other setting.

I’m not sure exactly what the best way to handle this would be but I’m sure we can come up with a good solution. Maybe the best thing would be to just have a "global template" option when selecting a template in the TV editor and then collect those into a special Global Content page.

Quote from: aNoble at Aug 23, 2005, 02:42 PM

I’ve been thinking that a better option might be to be able to define "global TVs" that would have only one value for the whole site instead of having a per-page value.

I agree. I think this would be a fantastic addition. I don’t think it would be all that difficult...a little tricky, but not very difficult. It’s possible we could add another variable for TV’s that, when selected, will make a TV a site-wide variable that can be used on any page and will be ignored when editing single pages. The question of course will be where do we edit the site-wide TV’s? Under System Configuration? Or perhaps in it’s own section? Could call them STV’s (Site-wide Template Variables). You would still create them under Manage Resources/Template Variables and we could always use different link colors to differentiate site-wide TV’s with page-level TV’s. There’s definitely alot of possibilities with this!

Hmmm,

When I first saw STV I started thinking about Satellite-TV - lol

With that aside such features are in the making

Could be MTV...short for MODx Template Variable...umm....nope! That’s been done too!

Quote from: xwisdom at Aug 23, 2005, 03:39 PM

Hmmm,

When I first saw STV I started thinking about Satellite-TV - lol

With that aside such features are in the making

I would love to see Global TV’s YES

I hacked the core a coule times to get some global variables into the system settings, but GTV’s would be much better if they would work the same as the DTV’d (Document TV’s) that way I can select if the client is able to change that or not. In the system settings this is not an option cause I do not like it that clients need acces to that part, exualy the ability to switch more off would be a cool thing also. Just showing the documents to edit with and in that edit screen only title and longtitle (or any thing that you switch on for that user) Our system is great but often to complex for users that only need to add/edit/delete pages.
whent a bit offtopic sorry

Hmm--not a bad idea, but let’s be careful to avoid bloat, ok? You can do a lot already with chunks and snippets. Chunks are already a limited type of global TV. You could include a snippet in your master template that sets some global placeholders. As far as core improvements, let’s keep in mind ways to improve existing features, not just add new ones, such as setting up a way to organize chunks, instead of just an alphabetized list. The chunks table already has an unused ’category’ field. Selective user editing is a good idea, but couldn’t that be just as easily set up for chunks, and just as useful?

For that matter, can we come up with a better word than "chunks"?

I guess what I’m really getting at is this: let’s shoot for improvements that solve more than one problem at once, rather than getting more and more specific kinds of features that bloat the code and clutter the interface. I know that’s what the dev team is thinking already and is most likely way ahead of me on this point.

But I do wish to note one more caution: let’s to be careful about how many kinds of parser tags we end up with. Between [[]], [**], [++], [~~] etc. it can already get confusing.

Personally I don’t see it as bloat, on the contrary I see it as consolidation. Right now all settings are being handled individually for the most part. If we use TV code in a modular way so that it can be applied against content, settings and other things then we have a truly modular system with minimal bloat.

Also, I’d vote for using [()] style tags. They are already used for site settings and what we’re talking about is really custom settings so I think it would be a good match and we’d have no new tags to memorize

Can you not just set a default value on a TV and not mess with it? Or restrict access to it?

Quote from: rthrash at Aug 23, 2005, 07:01 PM

Can you not just set a default value on a TV and not mess with it? Or restrict access to it?

I considered that and it would work but it seems like a more elegant solution would be good to have in the long run.

Attaching a site motto to every page and then never editing it seems like it could be a pain in the neck. What if you end up having 20 or more TVs that you treated like this. Every time you as an admin edited a page you’d have to wait for them all to load and work around them. Either that or you’d have to deny yourself access to them and login as someone else to change them. Plus every time you added a template you’d have to edit every TV individually to add it to the template. I think this would be a popular enough feature that we can come up with a better solution.

In actuallity what we’re talking about is chunks + TV input/output control. If we have something like this will anyone want to go back to chunks? Who wants to use a plain textarea when you could have all the control of a TV instead? Maybe we should consider a good way of mergeing the two concepts together?

Let me clarify by saying that I realize this is probably a bit pie-in-the-sky and not something we would be able to do right a way. But I think it’s always good to examine the way you’re doing things and throw out as many ideas as you can come up with until you find a good solution for everyone involved. So this is really just another one of my crazy ideas I’m throwing out