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#1 2009-09-28 21:01:45
- tennapel
- Member
- Registered: 2009-05-31
- Posts: 62
my feedback for future versions
I understand the charm of a small footprint and the plugin cloud to enhance the platform, but there a few basic things that I feel are missing from the core and should be part of any CMS:
- generation of internal links to articles. Images, and links have an interface to compose a textile, html or textpattern tag link and paste it in article text, but that’s not present for articles. That’s strange, consistent internal linking is a core feature of a CMS in my opinion. There are plugins like wet_link, but that’s a plugin and not a core function.
- search should include keywords standard, what else is keywords for?
- mechanism to preview pages articles as editor/admin on the page the article will be posted while editing. It is often very hard to see the impact of what you are composing on the page, until you release that article to a live status. There should be a possibility to see what a page looks like if the article is still being edited, but only for the editor/admin. The preview tab on the admin site only generates marked up text and does not generate textpattern tags, also the public css is not applied to it.
I feel that for most of the other stuff plugins suffice.
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Re: my feedback for future versions
tennapel wrote:
generation of internal links to articles.
Might be useful, but wet_link is more flexible imo. I admit I’ve never used the Tags feature on the Images and Files tabs though: didn’t even notice them! Having them on those pages is not as useful as upm_image_popper and upm_file_popper which put them on the Write tab.
search should include keywords standard, what else is keywords for?
Originally I think it was designed for meta description keyword lists. That may have been back in the days when search engines cared about keywords. Quite why keywords are omitted I couldn’t say. There may be a good reason… or not!
mechanism to preview pages articles
You can do this now. After you save an article as Draft, the View link appears next to the Title.
Last edited by Bloke (2009-09-28 21:20:38)
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Re: my feedback for future versions
Bloke wrote:
You can do this now. After you save an article as Draft, the View link appears next to the Title.
This wasn’t working for me and I figured out that it was because of zem_redirect
Piwik Dashboard, Google Analytics Dashboard, Minibar, Article Image Colorpicker, Admin Datepicker, Admin Google Map, Admin Colorpicker
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Re: my feedback for future versions
tennapel wrote:
mechanism to preview pages articles
Bloke wrote:
You can do this now. After you save an article as Draft, the View link appears next to the Title.
I
did
not
know
that
;-o
How long has that been there? What a winner.
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Re: my feedback for future versions
I’ve already stated this critic before, but it may have go unnoticed, so, lets try one more time:
the current article preview mechanism is OK to take a quick look on how the article will look on its permlink, but very limited to test how will it look across the site, that is, on the many places where that same article could be used: section listings, categories, recent article widgets, etc, etc.
It seems that it’s pretty important to us or our clients to see how a new article will “behave” on our site when published (aka “live”): will it broke the layout? will the title fit perfectly? will my SIFR/cufon solution work as expected? will the associated article image render fine?
It’s seems it’s terrifying to push the “Publish” button!
If we consider that a recently rather complex proposed solution (imho) got some “+1” feedback, I wonder if we couldn’t make it easier to check how articles will render on different places across our site.
Sometime ago, I came up with an idea that worked just the half and that eventually would need more polishing.
If you check this thread about previewing articles with proper CSS, you will see this idea here and some notes about it (why it didn’t work fully and what should change in TXP so to make the idea work) here.
Then ruud gave some feedback
Finally, ruud announced on that same thread that the current preview mechanism was implemented.
Basically, the idea was to take advantage of the semantics of draft/hidden/pending articles to set up a mechanism where privileged users could be able to see those drafted/hidden/pending articles as if they were already set to live or sticky.
The solution involved using txp:article or txp:article_custom and changing the value for status attribute depending if the visitor was a normal visitor or a privileged user (already logged in on TXP backend).
I thought it was a very textpatternish and simple way of implementing a preview mechanism, if needed.
But at that time, ruud didn’t like the idea of having (ab)using pending/hidden status for that purpose.
Maybe the idea could be reviewed?
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#7 2009-09-29 06:31:16
- tennapel
- Member
- Registered: 2009-05-31
- Posts: 62
Re: my feedback for future versions
Bloke wrote:
generation of internal links to articles.
Might be useful, but wet_link is more flexible imo. I admit I’ve never used the Tags feature on the Images and Files tabs though: didn’t even notice them! Having them on those pages is not as useful as upm_image_popper and upm_file_popper which put them on the Write tab.
I think you are now skipping the fact that internal linking (to images, articles, files) should be standard functionality of a CMS in the first place and not depended on plugins. How it is implemented is a secondary question.
It is important that editors and other non-tech users are able to maintain the content, that is what a CMS is for in my opinion.
Bloke wrote:
search should include keywords standard, what else is keywords for?
Originally I think it was designed for meta description keyword lists. That may have been back in the days when search engines cared about keywords. Quite why keywords are omitted I couldn’t say. There may be a good reason… or not!
That might be a good explanation. But we have moved on, tagging is common practice these days. I think the use and purpose of keywords should be evaluated and incorporated again in everyday use of textpattern. They can be incredibly useful.
Bloke wrote:
mechanism to preview pages articles
You can do this now. After you save an article as Draft, the View link appears next to the Title.
That escaped my attention too! thanks.
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