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Re: Slight semantic "enhancements" to admin-side 4.0.9.
I agree that remembering the last sorting method would already be a good (and unobtrusive) improvement.
Still, this doesn’t really guarantee much overview.
Right now, I’m working on a site which has about 80 articles in a section the name of which begins with an A, and additionally, the site contains about 10 sections, each containing about 10 articles.
You can imagine the resulting view in the article listing: there’s little to see except those 80 articles in the section that happens to be high up the alphabetical order.
If the user wants to access other sections of the site, s/he has to type in the section in the filter box.
Wouldn’t some kind of sidebar on the left be an idea, containing all sections, categories and maybe other filtering criteria?
The filter/search box could then also be placed in that sidebar, to keep the overall lay-out simple.
I realize that this is perhaps a job for plugins (at least at this moment) but how would you guys feel about a sidebar?
Last edited by jan (2009-04-28 18:03:11)
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#26 2009-04-28 18:18:02
- saccade
- Plugin Author
- From: Neubeuern, Germany
- Registered: 2004-11-05
- Posts: 521
Re: Slight semantic "enhancements" to admin-side 4.0.9.
Hi Jan,
I’m also working on sites with a lot of articles (400, 750 and the biggest 2400) and sometimes have to pick from the whole time range of them.
I’m not sure about a sidebar. Surely as an option offered by plugins, but I’m extensively/often working on the article catalogue(s) (I prefer that term instead of “list”) and using the detailed overview a lot – a sidebar would make the usable area much smaller and thus reduce the usefulness of the catalogue.
I’d prefer an “extension” tab e.g. for setting up “defaults” (pre-sets) and e.g. a select list of those individual pre-sets on top of the catalogue.
With this in mind it’s definitely a plugin-type of task.
Last edited by saccade (2009-04-28 18:35:13)
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Re: Slight semantic "enhancements" to admin-side 4.0.9.
Hey saccade,
What exactly do you mean by ‘defaults’ or ‘pre-sets’? Default filters or something?
By the way, your mention of a select box makes me think of an improvement of the filter box which would make the searching at least a bit faster:
Display a select box for all the criteria that have a finite and queriable set of matches, i.e. sections, categories and statuses.
Why would anyone want to do a search on these criteria? Doesn’t one always want to match a specific section, category or status? I mean, I don’t think it’s necessary to be able to search on the partial name of such an item.
This could be easily done with JQuery; you just display a select box instead of a text box where needed, and query the list of options with an AJAX call.
Forgive me if I’m talking past you saccade, I just thought this was a sensible idea by itself :-)
Last edited by jan (2009-04-28 23:13:34)
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#28 2009-04-28 23:18:37
- redbot
- Plugin Author
- Registered: 2006-02-14
- Posts: 1,410
Re: Slight semantic "enhancements" to admin-side 4.0.9.
I think this plugin does something similar. It seems to be no more available though.
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Re: Slight semantic "enhancements" to admin-side 4.0.9.
redbot wrote:
I think this plugin does something similar. It seems to be no more available though.
Oh, hahah even better!
It’s available, the download link on the textpattern.org page leads to his website where the plugin is listed at the top.
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Re: Slight semantic "enhancements" to admin-side 4.0.9.
Destry wrote:
Remembering a preferred sort order would be a nice addition, and I don’t think it would cause too much pissing if changed.
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#31 2009-04-29 07:47:04
- saccade
- Plugin Author
- From: Neubeuern, Germany
- Registered: 2004-11-05
- Posts: 521
Re: Slight semantic "enhancements" to admin-side 4.0.9.
@wet: absolutely great! :) Thanks a lot! You’re amazing!
@ defaults/pre-sets:
I think of individual combinations of search/filter-criteria in a set, which you can give a name, e.g. “live reports”, “hidden reports”
@ search on filter criteria:
I think an important point to keep in mind is, that a solution has to work on small sites as well as on very huge ones – or at least leave ways to adapt.
An automatic list of all (category-, section- …) options would loose its usefulness when there are many of them. (That’s what we are talking about.)
On a large site sometimes I have 100+ categories. An option list would be no good way to work (e.g. even in the write panel it’s a pain in this case – why I finally reduced them a lot, but that’s another thing).
An example:
There may be monthly “council reports”, managed by categories which reflect the year: “council-1995”, “council-1996”, “council-1998”, “council-2005” …
If I want to see the complete list I simply filter by “council-” and have all of them in a neat catalogue.
I even could filter for a decade of those by “council-200”.
So I think the combined search/filter is a valuable thing. Especially for large sites.
But you’re right for small sites with few sections/categories – here an automatic drop down list may be good.
Last edited by saccade (2009-04-29 07:57:22)
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