Revolution Manager User Experience and UI. Help make it amazing.

You could accomplish this by using a list and fill it with a query of all page ids

Thanks for your help and advice Daspoda! I will give it a try right away.
Still, I believe it would be great to have this as a standard option because so many people would find it useful.

Quote from: daspoda at Oct 13, 2010, 03:14 AM

is there any way to make the manager less javascripty?
I’m using FF and find it much slower to use overall compared to modx evo.
While chrome is a bit faster, it still feels like reloading everything is taking a while, maybe there could be the option to do a refresh the resources/elements manually



Also, I’m not sure if this was mentioned before, but I wasn’t able to find anything on it sofar.

In FF and chrome, the category tabs show up under template-variables, but in IE I get a list of all the tvs uncategorized

I got the same impression when I worked with evo just some days ago (I started MODx with revo). The evo manager seems to be much faster because there isn’t rendered everything with JavaScript. All the ExtJS stuff is really nice, but sometimes you’re losing a lot of time (e.g. selections which must perform an ajax request to be filled).

First of all, great work with Revo, I love it for the most part (and the parts I don’t love yet is because of lacking skills =D...like the whole xpdo database interaction with models/schemas and so on...I’m just not seeing through there yet...)!

I think many points were collected in this thread, not sure if the guy above ment the same with:

"- why would there be hover help for the well known Content Type but not some mysterious ’modDocument’ ’Class Key’?"

What I’m missing is the "Hover-Help" on Resources like in Evo...when I hover a Resource I would like to see at least the Menuindex, maybe some other options, so I don’t have to open the resource to see the menuindex...

that would be great!

keep up the good work!

Using the resources/file browser is frustrating b/c I can not move files nor can I control where my files get uploaded to.

For example:
With TinyMCE rich-text-editor, I want to upload an image to be inserted in the content. The image pop-up window opens and when I click on the "Browse" button (next to the ’Image URL’ field) it opens the "MODx Resources Browser" which at first glance seems great... however, the file tree is absolutely frustrating for one main reason:
You can not open folders without expanding the ENTIRE site tree structure (which takes way way too long).

Side note: You can change the ’Resource Path’ in the site settings to go directly to my ’assets’ folder, which saves time when expanding the file tree, but then whenever I upload images their ’src’ attributes are populated with the incomplete URL’s.

I think it is important for a CMS to be able to upload images/files easily to a designated folder/s but right now this doesn’t seem possible out-of-the-box. Am I missing something?

What would be nice is if I could browse through the site tree in the ’MODx Resources Browser’ by clicking on a folder and having that folder expand (just like the new ’File’ browser in the manager side bar). Then I could select where I want to upload my image AND if I upload my image in the wrong directory I want to be able to MOVE it to the right directory.

Also, it would be extremely important to me to be able to move files in the manager sidebar.

As is, I don’t see how I can hand my site over to my client without having my client get completely confused and frustrated with the Resources Browser & File browser in the manager side bar ie. not being able to easily select a folder to upload files to and not being able to move files once uploaded.

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*ps Revolution is frak’n awesome -minus the above issues


-MODx 2.0.4pl2

Went to the Jira site, but there was no way to register or add a bug.

When I tried to setup MODx Revo 2.0.6 (Traditional) on IE 8.0.6, once I got to the table setup, the collation fields were empty.

I was able to successfully install MODx with the same information using Google Chrome, as the collation drop down menus showed up.

You can file a bug here: http://bugs.modx.com/projects/revo and you register by going here: http://modxcms.com/community/register/

It’s a goal, yes, but you are right - it’s not a high priority. That is why we chose Ext - it allowed us to not spend as much time on developing the UI and instead focus on more of the core features.

Again, I’ve said it many times before - this is an open source app. You get what you put into it. We’ve built 097 so that it *can* do all that you’re asking - but that doesn’t mean us core devs are going to do it for you. It’s simply not time efficient. If you want a simpler manager, then I strongly suggest contributing in some way to 097 development. This is a community - not a developer request hotline.

I’m very, very sure that all the superb MODx developers have put in *zillions* of hours on MODx Revo. As a programmer who wrote a custom CMS in Perl, I respect that.

I do have to recommend, though, that serious thought be given to readjusting the focus to pay at least equal attention to the UI of the manager. Under the hood features are what make the car run like a sports car, but the driver’s seat is where we all live. If it’s hard to manage, then folks lose patience really quickly, even if the engine is incredible.

I would *love* to jump into Revo, and have installed 2.0.5, but I honestly feel like waiting until the Revo manager is up to speed. We’re all so busy that getting bogged down with a clunky manager is an unattractive prospect. I also can’t recommend it to clients unless it’s fast and easy to use. And that’s where the growth will happen; as we developers propagate Revo out to our client base.

It may be painful to hear, but unless the Revo manager is as whiz-bang as the Revo core, Revo may not be as successful as the developers wish. And that would be a great shame, and not at all what the developers want. And not at all what we MODx fans want either.

So, my recommendation is an adjustment of focus toward the manager.

With *all* due respect.

Peter

Peter your sports car analogy is apt but I find people are quick to jump on the fact that the Revo manager is slower feeling than Evo. Revo is significantly more powerful than Evo and while it needs UI and UX improvements, speed of the page refreshes in Revo is one consideration in the whole and would suggest people’s observations of clunkiness is coloured by the many differences in the look, terminology, objects, and more. Case in point: the system settings are not a simple matter of 4 tabs but a seemingly endless grid of settings that grows but settings are not limited in revo and the AJAX search for settings actually makes it incredibly fast to find settings vs scrolling up and down tabs.

New features in Revo like Quick Create/Update for resources and elements makes jumping between work faster and far quicker than in Evo, ExtJS allowed us to very quickly build web application features more quickly and easily than had we iteratively build every JS function ourselves. The strides in performance and accessibility made by the Sencha/ExtJs team are beneficial to both the user and developer.

I also would like to suggest that splittingred’s statement regarding priorities is accurate but not because we think UI is less important but because there are less than a few (basically 2 (splittingred & opengeek)) active core contributors to Revo. Making the system stable, functional and meet the developer deployment needs is critical to MODx as a tool. The more people who can work on Revo the more easily and quickly we can improve performance and UX/UI of the Manager.

The whole reason I started this thread was because we truly want to make Revo an Amazing experience and because it is important to everyone at MODx as a key component of "selling" it. I want people to share suggestions about how they think it could be great or specific improvements.

Ideally a discussion here will lead to people asking for features or enhancements to http://bugs.modx.com we’ve had some people go so far as to post mockups or proofs of concept for enhancements and we need more of that too.

Thanks again Peter for your feedback.

Cheers,

Jay

One of the abandonned roadmap goal was to allow a manager built with MODx itself (placeholder etc...), i think that it’s a shame that this idea has been abandonned.

That’s taken appart, i love ExtJS, it is really powerful and i’ve used it for other projects before MOD Revo.

But that power came with a high price: it is no more accessible to everyone (like jquery does) because the base knowledge needed to make someting interesting with it is high as well.

Most CMP’s are now dependent to the ExtJS framework which also means that any propostion to an alternative backend built with jquery/mootools/whatever would have to load MODExt as well.

As a comparison, making a custom admin page is breath with Wordpress.
That is not the case with MODx, and while i do know how to do it, i don’t use it at all because it is somehow cumbersome to play with (the markup and logic is heavily geared toward developper, not designers).

The slow manager feeling is also legitimate.
While i understand (and agreed) all the points raised about all the stong point in the manager, the fact that data’s are not loaded in the forms on page render is not user friendly.
The fact that the tree reload each page refresh is not user friendly.

I’m really looking forward to ExtJS4 which will solve many issues with speeds and markups.