Permanent/docking sitemap

[mindplay.dk]

Just thought I'd bring up one thing that sort of slows me down in the admin-interface.

I think it's fair to say that the sitemap in PW is the "heart of the beast" - and as such, I feel that this could be improved in the following way:

I'd like to see the sitemap (and possibly the primary admin shortcuts) stay docked on the left side of the screen - and have the sitemap maintain state, e.g. avoid reloading it on every request, and avoid having the sitemap "forget" what was open and closed.

For the most part, the admin interfaces leave plenty of horizontal screen real-estate - and if the sitemap was permanently docked on the left and would collapse to a thin vertical ribbon, you could still use 98% of the page width for the admin-interface.

This would probably also reduce load-time on admin pages somewhat, as the individual screens would no longer need to render the primary navigation and traverse the sitemap.

Perhaps this is a theme-job. If so, I'd like to hear from someone who has written a theme, do you think this is feasible without making changes to the core? Can a theme diverge from the usual workflow in this way?

Thanks!

[Pete]

I've thought about this a bit myself since its the default behaviour in MODx and is very useful. It's all do-able but the biggest thing would be changing the homepage landing page to something else otherwise you has a tree on the left and one in the main content

[ryan]

You are right it probably would be a theme job, and certainly doable in that context. As you probably know from the other thread, I don't like any more on the screen than I absolutely have to have at once. So keeping the page list out of the page editor is intended in the default admin theme. But I also understand why many might find it useful to have. Frames may not have a great rep, but that would probably be a good way to look at approaching it, so that the PageList doesn't have to reload on every request. And the editor wouldn't have to run on top of a layer of ajax/js. But there is likely a better way to implement it that I'm not thinking of. I think it would be a great option to have in one our custom admin themes.