Front End overlay

This is a big one.

End user (content manager) experience is what drives my website commissions. It strikes me that a Manager interface is great for coders, developers and the like but for the non-techie, frankly it’s pretty useless.

For the end user, who doesn’t have a clue about what drives the page we need something a bit different.

So, imagine, if you will, a web page editor comes along types in www.mysite.com/contact.html?edit=1 for example. An overlay (colorbox like) comes over the screen with all rtf TVs highlighted. when a TV is clicked on, a TinyMCE bar goes over it and the TV turns into an editable form area. Any TVs that are not visible could be put into a header overlay with any controls (log out, save) maybe with autohide. For edit these would be a cut down set (no aliases for example, though maybe a ’more’ button) for creation a modal dialogue with the full set of TVs for the page before the editor kicks in.

The rtf editor for the TVs would use the site CSS so that, as far as possible the edits would be WSYIWYG. Box expansion would be compromised but could be done with scroll bars. The CSS for divs on the page could be recycled to make the editing boxes.

What do you think? doable?

Would certainly put CMS into a new era.

I’d be happy to do the front end design and CSS work if any programmer wanted to run with this idea.

The guys at Digital Butter are working on UpFront, which is a front-end editor though not entirely how you described it. There’s also NewsPublisher and think there’s another one in development but can’t remember the name.

I personally never had issues training clients how to use the Manager though - in the end all they need is a few fields (rest hidden using FC rules) and some TVs with descriptive tags explaining what they do.

Explained it two weeks back to someone in the late 50’s while I am developing some custom functionality. I didn’t get any phonecalls, and besides some oddities (like blocks of text intended for a short paragraph filled with a page long text) the entered content is pretty decent. The site’s still breathing, and they seem to understand the basics.

NewsPublisher won’t do that, but it will put a button on the page that launches the editor. You can specify which resource fields and TVs show up in the editor and he content field, summary field, and any rich text TVs will get TinyMCE.

Quote from: Chris at Apr 28, 2011, 02:10 PM

What do you think? doable?

Already implemented in MODX Evolution with QuickManager+ plugin (comes with default installation):
http://www.maagit.fi/quickmanager-plus

For Revolution, you’ll have to wait. Definitely something like this is coming but unfortunately QuickManager+ is not going to be ported to Revolution (at least not by me).

Xedit.
Seems we need develope it further and port/redevelope it for revo.

Two quick points:

The Manager can be greatly simplified in Revo, so users will only see the fields you want them to see when editing a resource (and not much else), and of course you can do the same with NewsPublisher in the front end. User’s generally have very little trouble using the Manager as long as you tell them it’s just like their word processor.

The It’s All Text add-on for Firefox will give you just about any editor you want for any input field.

@ Bruno17

I took a look at Xedit it seemed a great idea, was there no interest or lack of time.
I also see they were talking of Mootools as the j-script lib/framework.
There was also talk of bloX where they two separate ’snippets’ or somehow linked.

I see you did some work on revo adding folders etc.

How much work needs to be done. I know that is very subjective question with no real answer.

I have been looking at extJS 4.0 which they claim is much faster I was most impressed with their use of Sass and Compass for the theming.
Have been playing around with Compass. (I know it uses ruby but it gets the job done with no need to know ruby just a touch of command line, ’I know not for everyone’.)

I will take a look at Mark H’s work and see how he is doing things he is also working on a mobile interface.

I suppose the only way to make it quick and slick is to just use php ie no j-scrip.

@allanb

If it’s not for Extjs4 specific work, there is a good php alternative for the couple sass/compass which is less -> lessphp.

You can find a conparison table here: https://gist.github.com/674726

I do prefer the less approach even though it still lacks some of the function provided by SASS/Compass (like @extend).

@lossendae

I had looked at less it seems it is now using js so in theory the end user could change the theme color as it is now ’compiled’ in the browser.
Even talk of server-side scripting.

Have you tried version 4 is it faster than YUI3

YUI2 to YUI3 seems in some way like Evo to Revo in MODX.

Maybe also ExtJS3 to ExtJS4.

All may be one giant leap for each version

Edit:- I took a further look at Less seems ruby php and js versions.
the js version claims faster operation on live site.

Question:- could a site-variable be used to replace the less variable
@global_color: [[++global-color]];
in a style.less file

This would be just awesome IMHO