Grouping/Customizing presentation of TVs

Greetings,

I’m curious if it’s possible to visually group TVs (i.e., to present them in any other way than the top-down method currently implemented by default). Ideally, it would be possible to create custom tabs that could be added to the container housing the General/Page Settings/META Keywords/Preview edit area for certain categories of content. But that’s not what I’m asking pointers on here (just a suggestion) ...

In my case, an article/news collection I’ve created has a handful of TVs (about eight in all) to handle various bits of information (author, co-author(s), source, url, date, titles, etc.). What’s become bothersome is the amount of scrolling necessary in the editing process after adding many TVs, handling this and other aspects of the site. Is it possible to alter the presentation in the manager to do something like:

---

[table]
[tr][td]field label 1[/td][td] | field 1 | [/td][td]field label 2[/td][td] | field 2 | [/td][/tr]
[tr][td]field label 3[/td][td] | field 3 | [/td][td]field label 4[/td][td] | field 4 | [/td][/tr]
[/table]

---

... and so on ... thus, using more of the horizontal space.

Along the same lines, it would be nice if, when creating a TV involving several checkboxes, you could float the fields instead of having them stretch down the page. (I know you can achieve the screen real estate savings by using other input methods, but some clients need the super-easy checkbox.)

To anyone’s knowledge, can this be done? If so, by simply altering specific css files or by other means?

Any hints appreciated ...

You can sort the order in which they show up in the manager, but this does not carry over to QuickEdit (I asked this question a while back and a hack was suggested but I did not bookmark it). To sort them click on the template that you are using and there is a tab showing the assigned TV for that template and I think that there is a sort button with a drag interface.

ManagerManager plug-in can help modify the manager presentation, but not sure if you can place some TV in a new tab or not. The support post for ManagerManager has some good info.

Thanks, yes ... I know about the sorting functionality. The actual layout manipulation is what I’m really going for ... Cheers!