Search filters and options for the Page FieldType

[landitus]

Hi! I was thinking that it would be great to improve and give more options to the Page FieldType. I was thinking the following:

• The Asm Select and PageListSelect could have more config options of how pages are listed, sorted and named (independent of those Pages' options). This could lead to list pages with different sort options to the ones defined in the parent page.
• I found that having the option to have a field image to represent the page helps a lot to link to page galleries. This is very custom and I understand PW is meant to be very open to how data is presented. 
• A search filter of some kind (similar to ACF for Wordpress) could improve selecting pages in sites with many pages as well. This could apply to both Asm Select and PageListSelect as well. With Select, there's the Chosen implementation which looks good. 
• Maybe I'm thinking too out of the box, but I think ACF relations widget (image attached) could fit into PW in a way that it can display pages in a non hierarchical way. Maybe listing all pages with template "X" could be shown this way. Pages with template "X" could be all over the Page tree and difficult to find and to sort.

I am sure you've all heard of ACF for Wordpress which I think has some very cool ideas about fields as well. I think some parts of the UI are actually very good to handle content for clients and not tech-savvy users as well. 

What do you think?

[kongondo]

Not exactly what you are suggesting but I assume you are aware that you can already search using PageAutocomplete? Just a thought..

[bcartier]

I have several sites where existing InputFields for Page fields won't quite cut it. (asmselect, page autocomplete, etc) 

We have good options for searching by keyword (page autocomplete), good options for browsing (asm, page list select),  The part that's missing is the combination of search and browse together, where you get more than just page titles as a result and where it's easy to select many results from the search.

I'd like to build something that returns a grid of results, each row with a checkbox, with an option to select all, and the ability to shift-click and ctrl-click to select multiple items. There must be a jQuery grid that would be suitable for that. Maybe a read-only handsontable that kongondo and wanze are working on.For the search field part, I was thinking it would default to a normal keyword search, but would detect and accept a PW Selector string to get really granular results. 

landitus - does that sound like it would meet your needs as well? Any other ideas?

[kongondo]

Handsontable can do shift-click natively. Using checkboxes to select non-consecutive rows is easily doable (as seen on the video demo on that thread.

[landitus]

Yes, I think that, like @bcartier says, sometimes all existing solutions fall short. And a combination of search/filter with and existing field type seems to fit best. I was thinking that in terms of usability, there are already some good examples to draw from. For example, the PageFieldSelect with Chosen or something similar, would work ok for both single and multiple selections ( as these are outputted outside the select). On the other hand, a data-table-like view of the pages sounds great as long as its not too over complicated and just let's you filter and select.

I am seeing some big potential with those data tables to find and sort data, and this could be the case too!

Maybe I could do some wireframing to check some of these options. I am more of a front end web designer and I could help with that.

[landitus]

Handsontable can do shift-click natively. Using checkboxes to select non-consecutive rows is easily doable (as seen on the video demo on that thread.

I find that checkboxes are sometimes not the best tool for the job. If the one task at hand is selection, then a simple click on the row should select. It should be decided if on click the selection is confirmed and placed outside the table whee the selections are stored and sorted. I tend to always find an alternative to checkboxes! maybe something like ACF where the selections are side by side.

[landitus]

I came across this Wordpress Plugin which has a similar feature to what I was referring. The ability to search/filter without leaving the tree looks useful. Check out the video to see it in action: http://eskapism.se/wordpress/cms-tree-page-view/

What do you think?

Edited August 18, 2014 by Martijn Geerts
fixed the link

[kongondo]

Getting a 403 on that link...

Edit:

There's a dot "." at the end of your link..that's why

Edited August 23, 2013 by kongondo

[kongondo]

The search feature is nice I have to agree

[arjen]

Nice addition! Seems very clever too.

[Mats]

+1 for search.