Weekly update – 8 January 2021

[Violet]

Thank you so much @Robin S and @Jan Romero for your detailed answers including full code, I would not have been able to come up with that on my own with my current coding ability, I only deal with my own sites and I have not figured out hooks on my own yet, so your code that I can copy and paste into my files is much appreciated. Sorry about the late reply - I had meant to get back to both of you much earlier. Likewise to your concerns, I did not want to derail this thread with my question. But to get back to the OP topic at hand, which is possible future changes for PW, specifically the admin panel, I feel that there is some relevancy for considering additional/dual sort order options built into the core. Maybe an option such as "sort children first by ..., next by ....." could be a possible feature for consideration in the PW core?

This is because I feel like perhaps one thing that could have a bit of emphasis in PW is the experience for the admin. If a designer is handing over a site to an admin, the admin is the one who will be adding more and more pages to the site, and ultimately they (hopefully) will wind up with hundreds of pages of content, some of which needs to be updated more frequently than others. In this case, having the page tree displayed by sorting by 2 different options could be very helpful. For example, in my case I'd like to sort by custom field "sticky" first, and then by "date published, reverse". I'm not trying to derail this thread into my use case, but I'd like to point out the general use case of a PW page tree of hundreds of pages, of which some will be more important/significant to quickly locate than others. The use case where all pages fit on one page of the page tree should be considered as an edge case rather than a typical use case in terms of the admin UX experience.

All of that said, I love the admin panel menu Find, and I love than I can narrow down to the pages I want there by selecting the combinations of templates and/or fields that are relevant. So that is a way of finding specific pages without looking manually at the many screens of page tree. Indeed, this Find menu itself can be used in combo with Jan Romero's custom "sticky" field, where any pages labelled "sticky" can be found easily. The existing Find menu as it stands is admittedly much better than any equivalents in other CMS's that I'm aware of. But I would love to see a dual way of sorting children in the admin page tree, I mean sort first by.... and next by.....

To be fair, I'm not sure if that's a feature that others see as important. Site admins who have hundreds of pages may well feel the need for something like this though.

[Jan Romero]

3 hours ago, Violet said:

I feel that there is some relevancy for considering additional/dual sort order options built into the core. Maybe an option such as "sort children first by ..., next by ....." could be a possible feature for consideration in the PW core?

Agreed. Reading the last page of this thread I was surprised this wasn’t already the case. Could be as simple as just taking a custom selector string instead of the current current single page dropdown. I suppose the idea was to have something very robust for users, since it can show up in individual page settings.

[Robin S]

4 hours ago, Violet said:

But I would love to see a dual way of sorting children in the admin page tree, I mean sort first by.... and next by.....

If you don't like to use a hook for this, there is a module: https://processwire.com/modules/process-page-list-multiple-sorting/

[joer80]

In the past, one of the primary functions of a page builder would be just to implement things like flexbox, so you could have child divs stack vertically or horizontally, or align child items vertically or horizontally, or whatnot, but now the new thing is to provide a third grid option, as an easy to use front end for handling things with CSS Grid.

Check out the way oxygen just introduced CSS grid controls.  I think we should do something similar in our approach. 

https://oxygenbuilder.com/2021/02/23/oxygen-3-7-now-available/?mc_cid=9b6f18191d&mc_eid=c2de8efb6e

[MarkE]

On 1/15/2021 at 11:46 PM, joer80 said:

I know some things I have struggled with in the past is exporting fields from one website to another to jump start a project, and option fields can't be imported in.  I have to go to each of, say 20 fields, and manuallycopy and paste all options in for all of them. 

+1. I am assuming there is something peculiar about options fields that makes this tricky, but it seems like this functionality was left unfinished some years ago. 

[joer80]

1 hour ago, MarkE said:

+1. I am assuming there is something peculiar about options fields that makes this tricky, but it seems like this functionality was left unfinished some years ago. 

I know, it's really a pretty big deal.  It makes it hard to reuse things.

[MarkE]

On 3/6/2021 at 5:24 PM, MarkE said:

I know some things I have struggled with in the past is exporting fields from one website to another to jump start a project, and option fields can't be imported in.  I have to go to each of, say 20 fields, and manuallycopy and paste all options in for all of them. 

 

On 3/6/2021 at 7:24 PM, joer80 said:

I know, it's really a pretty big deal.  It makes it hard to reuse things.

I've addressed that here. Hopefully I'll get to release some code shortly ?