Hi Elijah,

Great job with this - I haven't looked specifically at your implementation of this, however one thing I think would be important with the "publish selected pages" function, is that the pages shown in the tree are filtered so that only the pages where draft != live are shown / available for selection.

I guess you are going to have to implement some sort of filtering on the tree for the search, so hopefully there is the opportunity for some code reuse here.

In terms of visually hiding / showing nodes in the tree, personally I quite like the way I've done it here however I'll leave this up to your good judgement :-)

Fantastic work Elijah, as always. :-)

GSoC is almost over already? Whoa, it's gone so fast. ;-)

That's quite an effective tree search there... something like that would prove extremely useful as a built in feature for site tree's in the SS CMS!

Cheers,
Sean

> the "logged in as admin" looks like a button, is that intended? if yes, what action does
> it invoke?

To be honest I thought about making a button so that each user can go to his profile page to change his password, on the other site it should just be a panel in the status bar.

> status bar at the bottom could work if we use some highlight-effect

This should definitely use some fading-animation to attract the attention. After first few times the user will automatically look down there.

> we also have to check if we need multiline-statuses somewhere

Multiline status messages are quite uncommon, or not?

> and change the way ajax-errors are displayed (currently a big red status message)

I added an error dialog to my mockup. This dialog could also fade out automatically so that the user doesn't have to click on OK (maybe with some countdown on the OK button like "OK (10).. OK (9).. OK (8)" and so on).

"collapse"-button needs a vertical border spanning the whole height - at the moment it looks like you'd just be collapsing the currently viewed "sub-area".

Good point! I fixed that.

> the rearranged commands might work well for people with office experience, but its
> confusing having the two main actions affecting different parts of the UI
> "create"=>sitetree, "publish"=>current page). just my two cents, might be a non-issue :)

I don't think that this is confusing because Create also affects the content area (the part where TinyMCE resides) and primarily I want create a page (which is then the new current page) and not change the site tree. The change of the site tree is just a side effect of the page creation (as the change of the file structure in Word for example).

Here is the new version:

and the annotated version

> In terms of visually hiding / showing nodes in the tree, personally I quite like the way
> I've done it here however I'll leave this up to your good judgement :-)

The treesearch doesn't work in IE7.

Looks great!

>> we also have to check if we need multiline-statuses somewhere
> Multiline status messages are quite uncommon, or not?

given the short horizontal space we had for status messages before, programmers might've put a newline here and there (I know I did it once for a specific client hehe). but no biggie...

>> and change the way ajax-errors are displayed (currently a big red status message)
> I added an error dialog to my mockup. This dialog could also fade out automatically so that the user doesn't have to click on OK (maybe with some countdown on the OK button like "OK (10).. OK (9).. OK (8)" and so on).

the error-messages can get very long (sql, js-traces, ...) including css-styling, so we need something optimized for size that's easily scrollable. a close-button and a way to stop automatic fading would be a heaven's gift though - the current auto-fade is pretty annoying for longer stuff :D

> new vista-like throbber
hmmm, apart from my mac-bias, i'd prefer the plain-jane ajax-indicator which makes less assumptions about the color-scheme (http://www.silverstripe.com/cms/images/network-save.gif).

Seeing as there is going to be extensive work in the CMS area is it possible to make this interface somewhat skinable...
I'm not sure on what this would involve and I havent tried to skin the current interface however I feel the templating system used in the "actual" site would be able to be adapted for the backend as well...
I might already be like that because I haven't taken the time to look yet but yes i like skinning :-)

> Great job with this - I haven't looked specifically at your implementation of this, however one thing I think would be important with the "publish selected pages" function, is that the pages shown in the tree are filtered so that only the pages where draft != live are shown / available for selection.

> I guess you are going to have to implement some sort of filtering on the tree for the search, so hopefully there is the opportunity for some code reuse here.

See Re: CMS Search and Filter for a screenshot, patch and full details on how I implemented the Site Search interface.

I was beginning to write that I couldn't think of a good way to do this, but then I thought of using a checkbox:
------------------------------------------------------------------------
r40433 | elofgren | 2007-08-17 02:05:27 -0500 (Fri, 17 Aug 2007) | 5 lines

NEW FEATURE: Add 'Show only changed pages' checkbox above 'Publish the selected pages'
button under 'Bulk Actions'. Note: Pages that have children will always be
shown in case, their children have been changed.
Suggested here: http://www.silverstripe.com/silverstripe-development/flat/3799?showPost=4092#post4092

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Here are the changes that I made to add the checkbox this: http://www.elijahlofgren.com/silverstripe/patches/0001-Add-Show-only-changed-pages-checkbox-above-Publis.patch

Going to bed very late after having way too much fun adding Search features to SilverStripe's Site Tree, ;)

Elijah Lofgren

what a legend :-) I'm really looking forward to playing with this