fieldset grouping in admin

[Ben]

Would be great to see a new form of field-grouping in the template setup, one that conceals the inner workings of open and close fieldsets. The field nesting could use a UI similar to page listings where a field can sit under (indented below, draggable) a fieldgroup. Basically, this would make it idiot-proof.

This comes out of an upgrade from 2.3 to 2.5. I was confused as all my fieldgroup tabs either broke (wouldn't open) or didn't display during page editing. It turns out that when I set up the site (originally 2.2), I was a little obsessive about keeping the field-names snake_case. I came up with an alternative convention to the groupname/groupname_END because it didn't look right to my eyes. I know, I know.. but it worked from 2.2 to 2.3.

It took a while to track down what was going down. But the _END convention became enforced somewhere between 2.4 and 2.5. While I'm certainly a edge case, the convention can cause strange behavior as there's no way to know of the constraint until something goes wrong. Concealing the formbuilding mechanics would both eliminate the potential for misconfiguration and make field grouping more intiutive.

***********************

Edit 9/26: I think my initial post was confusing. After using the new default admin in 2.5, the indented presentation already exists. I hadn't seen that before writing the above, which I think contributed to a poor presentation of my case.

Were I to boil down the suggestion to its core, it's that the underpinnings of the FieldsetTabOpen are being surfaced unnecessarilly in the admin. The site administrator doesn't need to know of the <fieldgroup>_END. Better to conceal it from the front-end, or remove it altogether.

Edited September 26, 2014 by Ben