Curious About an Item in Roadmap

I was curious about the details of an item of Roadmap, under "Future".

Add Content Element support - Eliminates Resource Fields and makes Resources with an adjustable field base

Could one of the MODX team members chime in on the vision of this item and when its anticipated? It seems like it may be a partial replacement of Form Customization?

The idea is that the fields like content, pagetitle, description, introtext, etc., would just become Content Elements (i.e. like Template Variables are) which are attached to the Resource, instead of stored directly on it. This would make it possible to treat all "content" in a consistent way in order to make it more easily extensible for purposes like localization and versioning. That combined with some refactoring of how MODX stores Element metadata and content in general will open up some new possibilities for MODX performance and scalability.

It would not necessarily be a complete replacement for Form Customization directly, but "manager customization" in general is to be addressed in the next major version anyway.

I really like this idea. It would certainly simplify form customization and make content more versatile and easier to manage resource diversity.

Thanks for the insight.

Well, for years I've been nagging about having TVs - extended resource values - hooked to templates, when they have nothing at all to do with templates. It was just a convenient handle for categorizing resources. I've always maintained that it would have been much better to give resources categories, then hook the "ERV" to the resource category.

It would help if Form Customization worked better; especially for showing/hiding TVs for individual resources or groups of resources. Expanded usage of resource groups maybe? Those should be good for more than just security.

I've certainly shared that same pet peeve, Susan. For the sake of organization, we create "Page Templates", "Resource Containers", "Resource Items" categories under our templates so we can hook our form customization and TVs appropriately. That's no fun when a good portion of resources are only serving as containers or as a "list item".. where a template isn't at all necessary.

It's caused some challenges as we certainly want to use FC for our content editors, but then to make matters worse we have several sites running from one MODx installation. I think if the dependency was pulled away from templates this would alleviate many of our issues.

I'd envision some type of "Resource Class" that replaces the TV/FC connection to templates. You'd create a new class and with it, you could set what TVs are active/inactive, default values, label customization, actions, ACL overrides, etc. On the resource you'd then select the class or classes. I'd hesitate on using categories as they stand in MODx only because of the possibilities of extending to a cascading "Resource Class" system where we could set multiple classes and sort their priority on a single resource and I may want to still categorize my classes too.

Added to Wishlist: Check =)