A Revo-First-Timer's bug/tweak report

Hello MODx developers.

I’m loving MODx in general. I’ve build a couple of Evo sites, and enjoyed the experience, flexibility and power all the way through, with the obvious exception of the user management and account handling which is pretty bad in Evo.

I’ve just embarked on my first Revo site, which I’m hoping won’t turn out to be a mistake because it has several features I look forward to using including improved user management and Symlinks.

However, within an hour of investigating the manager interface several problems came to light that I thought I should report because I’d really love it if you all agreed and saw fit to deal with them. Here are the main points:

• Crippled in IE, effectively
• Having started using FF instead, I have login problems
• Drag & Drop snippet didn’t create tag
• Resources/Elements/Files state isn’t maintained on page change
• Resources/Elements/Files scrolls with page
• Javascript links in manager by default is very inconvenient
• Manager home view also doesn’t remember state

In order from the top:

1) I always use IE. I find it simpler and lighter weight and perfectly adequate. I test in FF of course, but shortly after installing Revo it became clear that it’s really quite crippled in IE. The package installer just doesn’t work at all, throwing JS errors all over the place. All other list boxes that use the same code are also largely broken. CSS in the manager seems fairly bad, with ’Save’/’Close’ etc buttons incorrectly position often. I realise all this code can be changed in Revo, but I really don’t have time for that so for now everyone involved with this site simply has to use FF.

2) Having switched to FF, I’m experiencing a strange issue with logging in. I can log in using IE but in FF it just clears the login form again. I managed to get around it, dunno how, but a colleague is still having trouble and is forced to deal with IE. Fortunately most of the IE bugs relate to the development site, including package management, so only I need experience them.

3) I become rather excited about the drag and drop feature. Tried it using a snippet I had written and all it did was inject the URL to some resource by ID. That’s no good! I expected it to contruct the snippet call. I’ll test again so I can be more specific. [EDIT: Retested and now it seems to be working - bit odd, but no matter.]

4) Every time I select a resource from the left manager column, template, chunk, snippet, etc the page refreshes and the bloody tree structure collapses and only expands the currently active branch. I’m surprised you guys haven’t already noticed how tedious development becomes in only a short period, with the constant need to re-open all the tree sections you’re currently working with because they close every time you click something. Evo’s left column is vastly superior in this regard.

5) In Evo the left manager column had it’s own frame and thus when editing a template or page, upon scrolling down one can still access the left column without the need to scroll back up. Clearly you can make it float like the ’Save’/’Close’ buttons on the right, because it might be longer than the current screen height. This is why a separate frame comes in handy, no? It’s significantly less easy to use than Evo and I can’t see any justification.

6) The whole manager interface seems contructed with needlessly flashy javascript. In FF all is well because when selecting items from the top menu, such as site Preview it opens in a new tab. But in IE it’s nice to be able to specifically REQUEST a new tab using a right-click, which doesn’t work at all if the buttons are all JS. It all seems rather heavy handed and brings no advantage I’ve been able to identify. While writing this I’m kinda hoping someone is going to reveal the option to change to a simpler manager theme that’s already built in. Even the home page/dashboard, or whatever you call it these days, takes a while to load up and initially plasters the content of all those boxes all over the screen before tiding it all up into a customisable array of expandable boxes...

7) ...which ALSO don’t recall their last used state which is very frustrating, especially if you decide to close them all to avoid the need to see all that MODx news every time. But of course it still gets plastered all over the page before the JS kicks in.

That’s all for now, so cheers for reading. I’ll gladly follow all of this up and be on hand for testing and stuff because I’d love to see these issues resolved. It’ll make Revo really shine for me.

Dave

Hi! Thanks for your input; it’s definitely appreciated. I’ll go through your points one-by-one.

1) IE is a crappy browser. It renders JS incredibly slowly, as shown in this AP article’s results:
[table]
[tr]
[td]Chrome 3.x
JavaScript Speed: 542.3ms
Max CPU Usage: 3.0%
DOM Selection Speed: 39ms
CSS Rendering Speed: 91ms
Page Load Time: 1.45s
Cache Performance: 0.72s[/td]
[td]Internet Explorer 8.x
JavaScript Speed: 6,305.5ms
Max CPU Usage: 13.1%
DOM Selection Speed: 137ms
CSS Rendering Speed: 793ms
Page Load Time: 1.61s
Cache Performance: 0.87s[/td]
[td]Safari 4.x
JavaScript Speed: 863.9ms
Max CPU Usage 4.4%
DOM Selection Speed: 30ms
CSS Rendering Speed: 117ms
Page Load Time: 1.61s
Cache Performance: 0.89s[/td]
[td]
Mozilla Firefox 3.x
JavaScript Speed: 1230.6ms
Max CPU Usage: 7.6%
DOM Selection Speed: 73ms
CSS Rendering Speed: 359ms
Page Load Time: 1.34s
Browser Cache Performance: 0.75s[/td]
[/tr]
[/table]

Now, people can feel free to use an outdated and old browser that renders improperly, but they will take the hit on newer, more rich web applications. IE9 is supposed to solve this issue, btw. We decided that providing a rich, usable interface was preferred over IE6/7 support. IE8 should work fine, albeit a bit slower since it has horrid JS support.

2) I’m unable to replicate your login issues with FF. You’d have to provide more information about your server to get help there.

4) The tree issue is a known issue, and something we’re looking into for 2.0.1. The main issue is that everyone wants their tree to do something different, so finding the *best* solution is our current task.

5) If someone would like to contribute code that would make the left nav fixed without seriously degrading performance, we’d definitely incorporate it.

6) To be honest, this is completely opinion - I find the Quick Update/Create options invaluable, the drag/drop of sorting Resources incredibly time-saving, and the ability to drag/drop straight into content panes a fab feature. All that requires some JavaScript, and we’ve chosen ExtJS as our JS framework. ExtJS is big, yes - but the benefits it provides are amazing, and we think people will start to realize that the more they get into Revo. Everyone’s a bit slow to come around to Revo when they start, but you’ll start to notice your workflow and site building time becomes significantly faster once you’ve started to use Revo for a bit.

7) That will be addressed in 2.1, where we’ll introduce custom manager dashboards.

Thanks for your input, and we’re glad you’re enjoying MODx, and hope to see you more in the community!

Well thanks for the prompt, and comprehensive response! One of my pet hates is when people respond to just one point, or fail to address all the important issues without even acknowledging them >:(

I’d like to resond to your points, however, as follows:

1) Wow, that’s quite a difference - had no idea IE was so... rubbish at JS! Let’s hope 9 does improve. But to be fair, my problem isn’t with performance, it’s with the fact that there are bits of Revo that just don’t work. I spent more than an hour trying to understand the purpose of the two buttons in Package Management, ’Add New Package’ and ’Download Extras’. After that I saw some obvious bugs so decide to try it in FF to make things clearer, at which point it became obvious that in IE it was actually BROKEN. FF displayed the packages and everything perfectly and all became... clearER. As it happens even to this day I struggle to understand the purpose behind both those buttons. It seems the ’Download Extras’ button is essentially what you’d expect, while the ’Add New Package’ button does the same but with some additional options to do with providers or something. Anyway, my point is that in IE it’s not so slow - it just doesn’t work! Do you know that? Is it just me? There’s actual errors. An error, in fact, that I looked up: http://bugs.modx.com/browse/MODX-2123 <- this exact error is what I get when trying to use the package management interface in IE. Nothing to do with quick editing but I suspect it’s related to some common JS. I’m babbling. Moving swiftly onwards...

2) I can’t reproduce it either, but I have a colleague currently experiencing the problem so I’ll try to come back with more info.

4) I’d be intrigued to know what other basic, fundamental functionality is being called for in this department. But surely everyone would want it to remember which branches were open from page to page. There’s a ’collapse’ and ’expand’ button after all, so if you want to reset it you can. It’s so fundamental, especially with regard to the speed of admin you claim (with which I totally agree and is one of the reason I’m looking forward to getting Revo replicated across several of my other sites asap), that it seems rather like someone just forgot to turn it on! If I want to work with the templates and chunks branches open, I’ve got to re-open them every time I change templates, chunks, etc. It boggles the mind...

5) I thought it worked rather well in Evo - why change it? You’ve said you prioritise UI over performance in older browsers. What’s the issue here - how bad can it be?

6) I’m completely behind all of this. I have no problem with use of JS across the board. EXCEPT with basic menus and fundmental UI that simply doesn’t need it. Links should just be links, where possible. If I’m honest this isn’t really a problem for me. The slowness I’ve experienced with the home page loading is clearly something IE will suffer from more accutely due to inefficient JS rendering. It still feels rather OTT even on FF if I remember correctly but it’s not a huge issue. It just seems unnecessary. The drag and drop stuff is great, so JS is clearly required. I haven’t tried the quick create/update stuff yet, I wasn’t quite sure what it was for. Now I think about it, FF’s way of opening all links in new tabs seems more natural to me that IE even though FF still provides the "open in new tab" option on right-click. But IE suffers yet more due to over complicated menu systems, an opinion (agreed) shared elsewhere: http://www.webmasterworld.com/content_management/4068217.htm <- though this guy is rather too harsh, going on to say that the decision to use javascript menus alone is proof that "this CMS was not designed with usability and accesibility in mind". I don’t agree with that at all but at least I’m not the only one who thinks that basic menus are the way forward. To reiterate: I have no doubt you’re correct, that Revo will speed up and simplify my work flow; right now it just seems like MS shouldn’t have taken Cut & Paste out of Windows Phone 7, for want of a better analogy

Amen! I second your opinion on all points jubbbird

Quote from: swiftouch at Aug 11, 2010, 08:02 PM

Amen! I second your opinion on all points jubbbird

Third-ed

You may be able to speed up the Manager home page quite a bit by disabling the two news feeds in System -> System Settings.

Goog idea. But at this stage I really do think that speed is the least of our problems.