managing large amounts of documents

[fenton]

Hi everybody

nice to see the project getting so much momentum!

not sure if it's already on the roadmap, but just in case it isn't, i would like to add an alternative option of managing a large amount of documets other than via document-tree.

from the official roadmap:

Customizable page "channel" view, in addition to the sitemap view currently in ProcessWire (Admin > Pages). This will enable browsing, viewing, editing of pages outside their parent/child structure. For instance, this view can match specific properties like having the same template, modified within the last day, or anything that you can match with a selector.

i'm currently a MODx user, and for a certain type of post's (news/blog) i find the document-tree view rather cumbersome. the approach was once picked up by community members, but i think it's stalled atm (crude example): http://imgur.com/a/EvSpL

what do you guys think?

cheers, jan

*edit* i mean as an option for a certain part of the document-tree, not in general

[ryan]

This is consistent with what's being planned. A "channel" would be defined as a selector or combination of selectors that can lead to a group of pages outside of the page tree. For instance:

template=news, sort=-modified

That would be a selector that lists all news items regardless of where they live in the tree structure, and places them in reverse chronological order according to when they were last edited. So I think of that as a "news" channel". If you wanted to do it from one of your templates, you would do this:

$items = $pages->find("template=news, sort=-modified"); 
echo $items->render(); // or iterate and display your own fields

I'm thinking of this channel view as being kind of an advanced search engine, where you can build a selector to look at a particular view of pages (channel). Then you can perform operations on the pages together as groups. You could predefine your own channels for later use in the admin or the API. Some parts of the admin would also predefine their own channels as well. For instance, there would be a link for each template in "Setup > Templates > Template" to display all the pages that use that template.

The nice thing about this channel view is that it will be relatively easy to implement since all the page retrieval, field matching and pagination is already done... it's just a matter of building a nice interface around it. The only reason I haven't done it yet is because in my own sites I usually build the channel views on the front end of the site (with templates). Many of them make it in the public site, as views that are useful on the admin are very often useful to the site's users too.

Also, I wanted to add that the existing Pages tree is customizable in terms of sorting and what fields it displays.

http://processwire.com/talk/index.php/topic,120.msg749.html#msg749

[fenton]

nice thanks for clarification!