Separating posts from pages in manager nav

Mod note: Split from http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php/topic,8096.0.html

Hi All,

Further to my ideas about seperating posts from pages (for display/management purposes), I have dusted off photoshop and created a quick mockup on how it would make sense to me, using the existing manager.

It may be ’death by tabs’, but allows a lot of info to be managed reasonably intuitively in a small space (while still giving flexibility to the existing UI)

Let me know what you think.



To me, this makes sense.

I can manage my pages,posts and documents seperately.
This helps to ’lock down’ areas for editing ie User A is only given permissions to add/delete/edit posts under category xxx and pages in folder xxx. So, when User A logs in (backend) they see only the areas they allowed to do something in, and then they can do what they want under their areas. Because they are not distracted with the whole site and a distinction is clearly made between pages and posts things are easy (admin takes care of where these posts and pages need to appear in the site)

I can use templating/snippet logic in pages to display any combination of posts and documents. This would allow extreme flexibility ie show by category, tag, aggregate multiple anywhere in the site. it means that the confusion in the current system regarding where a ’post document’ lives is avoided. It does not live in a folder (child to that folder) but ’lives’ within a category and belongs to tags. It can ’show up’ anywhere, on any page, within any snippet. Pages cannot, they are the container to content that may or may not include posts. make any sense???

NOTE: Maybe ’Posts’ could have two further distinctions ie News Items and Blog Items (News Items belong to the whole site (generic) and Blog Items belong to a user)??

Quote from: kiwi_dude at Oct 20, 2006, 06:32 PM

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Let me know what you think.
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I like the idea, but I’m afraid it would also limit MODx quite a lot; you can have more than one ’news posting’ page and for the same matter multiple blog pages - with different content. So for that you’d also need to find a solution, I suppose.

There is already an excellent "categories" addition to the resources (templates, snippets, chunks, etc). Perhaps something like this would be useful for documents as well. You could use a TV, then make a module to use those TVs to categorize your documents.

Only just saw this (and have promoted it to a new thread).

I think in principle having different lists in the left-hand nav would be good. I know there are different views available already, and one can always write a module, but that’s all right-hand pane. Kiwi_dude (and others) seem to want more choice in the left-hand pane.

I said something about this in the Rethinking MODx thread, which has so far been mostly overlooked. I’ve emboldened the bit that would be relevant here:

Quote from: PaulGregory at Nov 02, 2006, 01:14 PM

So, how about if the left panel had a choice of view?
They could include:
* tree hierarchy
* flat listing, alpha sort
* flat listing, date sort
* flat listing, just my documents
* grouped expandable listing, grouped by template
* grouped expandable listing, status sort
* flat listing, search results

and also the ability to add custom views:
* grouped expandable listing, grouped by TV (and thus enabling categories or tags)?
* grouped expandable listing, grouped by TVs within another TV (and thus enabling section/subsection)?

Manager users could toggle through these, but it would remember the setting for next time.

That way everyone would seem to be happy. It looks like ultimately we’ll need to be grouping by context, so this would be a stepping stone to that...

So basically I was proposing a dropdown rather than tabs, because I envisage more viewtypes than could fit in tabs, but other than that largely the same idea.

I like this discussion a lot and had planned on revisiting it after the 095 release. Please feel free to preemptively start the discussion!

So, how about if the left panel had a choice of view?
They could include:
* tree hierarchy
* flat listing, alpha sort
* flat listing, date sort
* flat listing, just my documents
* grouped expandable listing, grouped by template
* grouped expandable listing, status sort
* flat listing, search results

and also the ability to add custom views:
* grouped expandable listing, grouped by TV (and thus enabling categories or tags)?
* grouped expandable listing, grouped by TVs within another TV (and thus enabling section/subsection)?

I like the idea of more customisability on a user basis for the backend; not everyone prefers the hierarchy view, i’m quite sure of that .

Custom views; I like that idea, but I’m personally not a fan of a template variable-thing, giving it too many features will confuse people for sure (just like I am right now, going to check the documentation on it again), perhaps a separate option wouldn’t hurt.

The way of viewing may depend as much on the particular site, info structure, as well as the intended audience. There truly may not be a one-size fits all, but having the flexibility to determine the layout or a choice of layouts would be beneficial.

It might be nice if there was some way, from a master admin/developer level to toggle the availability of views.

I agree, having 10 different ways to view things could be more confusing than say 2 or even 3, but that 2 or 3 could be different for every installation. Allowing a way to configure the appropriate 2 or 3, or all 10 (or whatever the number) for the specific situation would be very powerful, either at a per user level or at least a global setting per installation.