Possible to layout pages this way? (Page Tree Q)

[joer80]

Instead of putting Home at the top and all pages under home, is it possible to have Home on the same level as other pages?  Or possible to have more than one top level page?  See this example:

Pages

   Home

   About

Posts

  Blog Post

Categories

  Category 1

Menus

  Top

  Bottom

Media

  Photos

  Video

Settings

  Location

  Website

 

All bold pages would be top level pages with their own children.

 

Thanks!

[ottogal]

It's a principle of the page tree organisation in PW that all pages have to be children of one single root page - it's title is Home by default, but you may change it as you like.

If you like to send your site visitors to a certain page in the tree, you can redirect to it. It just cannot have the title Home, so use Start or whatwver seems adequate.

Another question is if this redirecting leads to a good user experience. The visitor normally would not expect to land on a subpage. I'd rethink the tree structure.

[monchu]

In addition to Ottogal, the structure of PW in the admin area is not all about web page content. It is a container of functions based on template fields.

For i.e. you can create a page of cities where all children pages are the city name. Then use it in your drop-down selection field.

[joer80]

Maybe the best way to accomplish this layout would be to allow the "Pages" page to the be the home root, and the other top level types could be top level in appearance only. Just make a way to flag which pages should look top level when its building the page tree.

Or better yet, maybe drop people off at a dashboard instead of the page tree with a layout similar to the above.  That way I can organize it without messing with routing.

[adrian]

Maybe I am incorrect, but it seems like you are trying to WP'ize PW. I think that it makes more sense to educate the client that in PW the page tree is hierarchical and this makes much more sense than having Posts and Pages listed at the same level, with Home below Pages. 

Maybe if you need Posts, Categories, Media, etc to stand out you could make use of icons in front of those parent pages? It might give the visual cues that the client needs to find these easily amongst the other top level pages?

 

[joer80]

Icons is another good idea to make the main types stand out.  Thanks!

 

[Pixrael]

try this https://modules.processwire.com/modules/template-decorator/

[Macrura]

22 hours ago, joer80 said:

Or better yet, maybe drop people off at a dashboard instead of the page tree with a layout similar to the above.  That way I can organize it without messing with routing.

I use a dashboard for most big sites, and shortcuts on there to all of the major interactions; i have clients who interact with their content only through the dashboard and lister pro listers, and some settings pages that have shortcuts to edit on the dash...

[pwired]

man i love this thread

[joer80]

2 hours ago, Macrura said:

I use a dashboard for most big sites, and shortcuts on there to all of the major interactions; i have clients who interact with their content only through the dashboard and lister pro listers, and some settings pages that have shortcuts to edit on the dash...

A page tree is very flexible, but I think sometimes users want to be guided more.  I think the task based dashboard is the way to go as the default view in my situation.  I would be interested in screenshots of any dashboards you have done in the past if you have any you an show!

[szabesz]

4 hours ago, joer80 said:

I would be interested in screenshots of any dashboards you have done in the past if you have any you an show!

If you happen to use the UIkit Admin Theme then its very easy to craft any sort of custom GUI just by using its styles.

[Macrura]

10 hours ago, joer80 said:

I would be interested in screenshots of any dashboards you have done in the past if you have any you an show!

here is a screenshot of a dashboard, i'm using a simple grid framework + a free admin theme (AdminLTE 2) + masonry for the 'widgets'; i use 3-4 types of widgets, one is a set of shortcuts which is configurable to show on different users, or access levels; this allows individual users to have their own custom set of shortcuts if needed. The other types of widgets are a mini lister, and a formbuilder list; The formbuilder list can display recent submissions to various forms, and is helpful for admins who want to see a quick overview of recent submissions.

Spoiler

 

[joer80]

Very nice!  

I am going to do something similar on my next project!

[Robin S]

@Macrura, I'm intrigued by the "Flagged Works" section in your dashboard screenshot. Is that some kind of automatic pre-flight that checks user edits for possible errors? Could you explain about it?

[Macrura]

@Robin S - sure, here is some info on how i use page flags (sorry if this is off-topic and/or verbose!)

1) i setup a (page reference) field to hold flags for any page (usually I use chosen select, but ASM select is also good for this); Users have to be able to add flags.

2) I start traversing through a type of content, (in this case the musical works of a pretty famous composer), and find problems; for this project the works were imported from another system, and now need to be cleaned up; the flags helps us to track, group, filter the works that have certain issues, or maybe need attention from some specialized member of the team;

I have also setup a certain amount of auto-flagging, just by checking the fields on save and adding the flag if problems are found – for example (on a different site) the admins want to add a subscription form strategically inside the body content of their blog posts; there was no easy way to do that except by manually adding the hanna code to the body copy where they want it; But they have several hundred blog posts and don't know which ones they missed; so i have the system scan the body field for the hanna code and if not there, add the 'missing subscribe form' flag to those posts.