improving Revo flow

Hello

First-- thanks everyone for your hard work putting together MODx, this site, and this community! You’ve done an amazing job, and I’m so happy to have MODx ready to go as a tool for my disposal whenever its needed.

I’m just starting a new revo project, and it seems like the interface could use another layer of UX revision; something that would take MODx from a powerful tool to a powerful tool that is a breeze and a joy to use. I’d rather leave it to someone who knows more about UX professionally than I, but I do see small things that could be better - here’s what comes to mind after just a little use:

Why so much ajax? For example, it would seem so much faster to have everything in the Elements tab loaded in a single call.

Syntax highlighting for snippets rocks - why not include it out of the box?

I find myself working on one snippet, one chunk, one file, and one template, alot, all in conjunction. It would be awesome to have a quick history, to allow you to easily switch between recent documents. Like having multiple tabs open in your favorite editor.

Coming back from a haitus, its easy to forget the various syntaxes... and really, why should that be required. Quick buttons/helpers for insert snippet, TV, chunk, etc would be so nice, in a very modest kind of way.

Extras - Adding new package.. 99% of the time you just want to see things in the modx repository.. 5ish clicks and a couple of loads could be shaved off here easily.

I realize that a lot of this has probably been on the TODO or in the back of the mind while more pressing issues are around.. I would totally jump in and start looking at tackling these issues if I could, but unfortunately life has a lot of other things jostling for my attention right now... ;-) I just hope that maybe I can add value in giving user feedback as someone with some code experience.

If good flow & UX were to be a big focus for future work, I think it would remove any doubts in my mind when telling WPheads and the like that MODx is the way to go...

Thoughts? Discussion?

Cheers!
--Peter

Hi Peter. Thanks for your comments.
Quote from: pehrlich at Aug 17, 2010, 07:27 PM

Why so much ajax? For example, it would seem so much faster to have everything in the Elements tab loaded in a single call.

I thought that at first when designing the UI, but this became a problem pretty quick - doing so would hinder the ability to keep the tree "fresh", in the sense that it can easily be updated when an action occurs elsewhere on the page. Plus, loading the entire tree could take *ages* on a large site - doing the entire tree simply doesn’t scale in larger environments.

Syntax highlighting for snippets rocks - why not include it out of the box?

Some people don’t like it, or want it. Some people also want a different syntax highlighter. Preferences, basically. We didn’t want to restrict that option for people, and installing them is ridiculously easy in Revo through Package Management anyway.

I find myself working on one snippet, one chunk, one file, and one template, alot, all in conjunction. It would be awesome to have a quick history, to allow you to easily switch between recent documents. Like having multiple tabs open in your favorite editor.

See "Quick Update/Create" on the context menus in the tree. Work on everything in a window.

Coming back from a haitus, its easy to forget the various syntaxes... and really, why should that be required. Quick buttons/helpers for insert snippet, TV, chunk, etc would be so nice, in a very modest kind of way.

Drag a Resource/Element/File into the content pane (or any other field for that matter).

Extras - Adding new package.. 99% of the time you just want to see things in the modx repository.. 5ish clicks and a couple of loads could be shaved off here easily.

Click the "Download Extras" button on the grid toolbar.


Thanks for your input Peter!