why i love pw's tree!!

[diogo]

this looks so scary...

[renobird]

I feel like I broke something in that install just by looking at the screenshot.

[MarcC]

I don't understand the advantage of tree root != Home. Contao is a pretty big enterprisy thing though. Speaking of CMS/CMF stuff, I thought Directus was a bit closer to what we're enjoying with ProcessWire. Interesting that they actually expose the term "table" (as in DB table) to end users though.

[teppo]

First time I looked I only saw the left side of that thing and thought that "well, this isn't so bad." Now I wish I didn't see the rest of it.

@MarcC: that (root != home) is a strange thing, really. Never understood it myself. I guess there must be something that we're just missing though -- I've had more than one client specifically request that kind of structure before..

[geniestreiche]

the differences between the contao and the pw tree are not so big. when you click an item in pw you have the links to edit, move, create and thats quite similar to the icons on the right side of the contao tree. in contao i see the advantage (its not on the picture) to edit more than one item. where pw shines is the markup creation. in contao its hard to customize some parts especially forms and you can't customize the content elements in contao out of the box.

[diogo]

@geniestreiche I really didn't try a lot of contao. I only had a very superficial look at the demo page. I'm not trying to put contao down here, but at the first sight, I have no doubt that someone that is faced with all those icons will be very confused. I must agree with Ryan that words are much more friendly for this kind of things.

[Adam Kiss]

@Marco, @teppo: There are systems, where you actually do more than 'just' manage content in the administration: review orders, check for contact form submissions, etc. Also, there are systems/work settings, where you have multiple editors, and one chief editor. Understand: if there are things you do with your administration MORE then 'just' administer content, it's possible some kind of dashboard will be better solution than root == pages.

Also, (with regards to more typical workflow), if I update some page just once/twice a year, I might like to see if there are any updates upfront, for instance.

[teppo]

As a clarification to my original post:

I've no doubt that this system is very powerful and lets you do a lot from that one single view. I also have no problem with a dashboard style UI, since it does have it's merits (though quite often dashboards are added just because they look cool.. and no, that's not a very good reason.)

What I don't (and won't) understand is this particular choice of UI style. In that example above I see a huge pile of icons, all visible at once. Not only does it look stuffed, some of those icons really fail to convey what action they're tied to.. and I'm also pretty sure that someone as clumsy as me would way too often click wrong one without realizing that and cause unnecessary problems. There's a reason why many UI designers like to hide action buttons by default.

PW has taken a completely different approach, yet it still manages to solve similar problems:

* only the most common (and only nondestructive, unless you've installed a module that adds destructive ones among them) actions are available via tree,

* actions are hidden by default and only visible after a page name has been clicked, thus reducing the clutter of tree view,

* text is used instead of icons (the actions of which you'd have to either guess or remember.)

It's simple and powerful and has a very small chance of confusing users. Of course once you've used a system for long enough you'll know exactly what all those tricky little buttons do -- but with the approach PW has taken none of these problems even exist in the first place.

My point is that a powerful system can still have well designed UI. Or is that too much to ask?

Regarding the point @adamkiss made about root != pages approach, I guess that makes sense in some (limited) situations. Still, PW has proven that even many of those situations can still be handled very well with it's "everything lives within one tree structure" solution. So forgive me for being somewhat skeptical here.

If there's a need to create another tree, I'd rather see it as a completely separate entity, not artificially stuffed within one huge pile of everything. But hey, that's just my opinion -- everyone has one (or more) of those

[diogo]

There's another detail that makes all the difference. The fact that in contao, the buttons are aligned to the right, far away from the pages name, makes it much more difficult to identify what line of buttons refer to wish page.

is how I feel like by looking at that image

[renobird]

Maruchan, MarcC, Marco, Robin Masters?

Directus looks pretty cool, but as soon they started talking about tables and using SQLPro/PHPMyAdmin I lost interest.

diogo,

ROFL!!! Well played.

[geniestreiche]

@teppo: yes, i think you're right. in your detail look the pw way is the better choice. i used contao for a couple of sites and every time i must look to the two icons on the right side of the action buttons to recognize what i wanto to do.