Textpattern CMS support forum
You are not logged in. Register | Login | Help
- Topics: Active | Unanswered
Pages: 1
On the userfriendliness of 'Articles'
Ever since the gammas the layout of the “articles” page and the all-in-one nature of articles themselves have bothered me.
- clients tend to not really need the current every-section chronological view so as much as a simpler “display only this section” view. I wrote hack which accomplishes this a while ago, but it wasn’t really patch quality. Would this be core-worthy? A preference you could turn on somewhere?
- clients consistently write the same type of articles, and the article editing page always includes every option. There’s a lot of intimidating extra stuff on the screen, and custom values might have different meanings in different sections.
For example: you define an “event” article, for which the section gets set to “event,” custom1 is labelled “Location” and the publishing date is more prominently featured and re-labelled “date of event”. When you start dealing with online shops or e-zines this becomes even more relevant.
Custom CMS’s I’ve written in the past handle stuff like this really well, but I’m gunning for something with txp’s extensibility and some healthy peer review. Has anyone else thought about this problem, or used packages which handle this issue elegantly?
Offline
Re: On the userfriendliness of 'Articles'
Jamie,
I have raised this issue several times before, but have seen little done with it. Perhaps if we “the folks who think this is important”, could come up with a consistant scheme for how this would opperate, we could get it further along. At the moment I think the devs are caught up in other issues, (RSS feeds, Security issues, etc).
For me, I have been interested in a show/hide function based on level of author.
Each level of writer, could be adjusted by a series of radio buttons or check boxes for what to show, and what to hide from that author. A little more flexibility for a bit more control.
I imagine a permissions tab with 6 levels of authors within, each with the same set of options.
Perhaps with a default that only the publisher can change certain things, to help maintain security and stability of the install?
Whaddya think?
Details?
Matthew
- I am Squared Eye and I
am launchinghave launched Pattern Tap
Offline
#3 2005-12-26 01:35:19
- Mary
- Sock Enthusiast
- Registered: 2004-06-27
- Posts: 6,236
Re: On the userfriendliness of 'Articles'
Some stuff can be hidden if they aren’t used at all, like excerpts and custom fields. Partially hiding things takes a little more work.
For instance, Jamie:
…and custom values might have different meanings in different sections.
I think we can all see the reasoning behind it, but how do we go about implementing it?
There’s been discussion about section permissions, but I think this would fit in/around the same area.
We’d need to work around the fact that there is the “section” dropdown.
Perhaps when you switch the section, the page reloads (with a warning) with the appropriate section “view” for whomever the user is. The one drawback to that method would be the potential to lose field data. Even though those specific fields wouldn’t be available for the other section, the data might still be relevant for another field. That would be pretty complicated.
Perhaps when you click on the write tab/login, the write tab is presented to you for whichever your default section and it’s settings are. Then you could also have a link to a page listing links to write to different sections (and their setups). That might mean more clicks than someone would want. Alternately placing these links on the write page itself would only clog up the page with more choices.
Knowledge of PHP isn’t necessary, rather it’s the logic behind it (case examples, how should it work, etc) that needs to be figured out first.
Offline
Re: On the userfriendliness of 'Articles'
On the issue of what is displayed when, its seems that custom fields (which are crucital to the TXP sites I have set up) should necessarily be section specific at some level. In a very basic case imaging using custom fields to store product information, and those same fields showing up when you are working on an article for an about section. The implimentation process here could be maybe assign labels for different custom field to individual sections (or groups of sections)—similar to what was mentioned above. The easier option would be to assign costom fields themselves to sections. In these arrangements, only the custom fields assigned to a given section would display within a given article write tab.
Offline
Re: On the userfriendliness of 'Articles'
Mary, et all,
To alleviate the issue the section dropdown list, a “author profile” tab could be used to control user and/or author permissions?
For the Admin:
1. The ability to check on/off any field in the write tab which is not/will not be utilized in the functionality of the site (ie: keywords, article image, etc.)
2. The ability to check on/off any field in the write tab for a specific author type (staff writer)l (or greater than Staff Writer/less than Staff Writer). For instance.
As I have written, elsewhere I think this should be kept as straightforward and simple as possible, with creativity on its use and implementation arising out of the natural boundaries of limited choices.
Matthew
- I am Squared Eye and I
am launchinghave launched Pattern Tap
Offline
Pages: 1