Textpattern Support Forum

Els, you are the mirror that shows a normal man that he is a clown. Thank you!

I’m considering adding ‘search/replace’ functionality to this plugin — and give the ability to resave articles for those that want to regenerate the HTML en-masse from Textiled markup — but I want it to work in a specific way. My ideas are here and here (not set in stone).

I’m a bit stuck on how to factor this into the interface workflow though. Please, if anybody has any thoughts on this, design ideas, mockups, stuff like that, feel free to post/send me anything you have. The answer’s probably reasonably simple but it’ll require a GUI guru to point me in the right direction. Thanks!

Last edited by Bloke (2011-07-10 17:22:21)

Thanks stephan. That sorta looks like the direction I was considering. I’d need to simplify it a bit since the search is ‘global’ and results are in columns spanning content types. So I’d probably try and strip it down to this:

1. initially, the interface appears pretty much as you see it today on tab load
2. search for something / orphan with associated attributes (regex, exact, include, blah blah)
3. results appear with checkboxes next to each matching item
4. new widget row also appears below / alongside the Search results heading with ‘Actions…’ dropdown (last action remembered) and a ‘Go’ button. The actions I can currently think of are:
   1. replace
   2. delete
   3. re-save (articles only)
5. depending on chosen action, a further input box may appear alongside the dropdown if you choose ‘replace’ (in all other cases, there is no additional input box to reduce screen clutter)
6. when you click ‘Go’, your chosen action is applied to all checked resources in the result set and you are returned to the original search screen to perform your next find operation

Not sure if that workflow is ideal, but that was my first stab. I’d look to finding some way of making multiple checkbox selections simple — like TXP’s multi-edit facility (but perhaps not as feature rich, as I’m not sure how I’d squeeze it in). My opening gambit was simply a select all/none toggle facility if you clicked the heading in one of the columns.

If anyone has any improvements or ideas, please share them.

Last edited by Bloke (2011-07-10 19:49:34)

Zanza wrote:

I’d just make a call for a “feedback” message after point 6 and before the new blank search screen

Yeah, that’d probably appear in the usual message area, e.g. 311 replacements made. Will that do? Or are you talking about a complete report on what was done?

Zanza wrote:

What if some task are successfully done only on a part of the record set?

Perhaps the ability to have a report would be best then. I’d probably make it optional (like in smd_tags) so you could see the results of the last action.

Actually, I wonder now if it might make sense to not take you back to the search screen again but leave the same results set from the previous search selected. That would allow you to perform multiple search/replace actions on the same group of results. The ability to start a new search is always available from the top of the panel so I don’t think we’d lose functionality. Will see how it pans out when I get round to looking at it.

If anyone has any further ideas, do shout.