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Content Editor Discussions /

Forum for content editors and CMS users.

Moderators: martimiz, Sean, Ed, biapar, Willr, Ingo, swaiba

CMS Usability Feedback


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5 Posts   2604 Views

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maetl

Community Member, 15 Posts

1 February 2009 at 8:40pm

Having been using the CMS more from a content editors perspective than as a developer recently, I've come across a few niggles which I'd like to point out, in the hope that this will assist in making improvements to the design of the CMS editing tools and overall user experience.

1) I would prefer the "Navigation Label" field to be moved to the "Metadata Tab". I find that having two (usually identical) title fields is mildly jarring, and in the common case, is not actually useful to me. Perhaps other people do find this useful, but I find it detracts from the focus on this screen, which is the rich text editor. Bringing me to my next point...

2) The rich text editor for page editing is not tall enough for longer content pages. The space feels constricted, and involves a great deal of scrolling. I simply find the ration of height to width on this content box far too skewed towards the width, and it's not as comfortable as it could be. Also, if there is a "fullscreen" button on TinyMCE, I couldn't find it. FCKEditor has this, and it works rather well.

3) A more esoteric problem that I have been running into, because of my keyboard muscle memory... When cleaning up imported paragraphs, I quite often hit Apple-Left-Arrow to skip the cursor to the end of the line. This inadvertently causes the browser back button to be triggered, which skips back a page, and I lose all my unsaved edits.

Will post more feedback as I notice things...

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maetl

Community Member, 15 Posts

1 February 2009 at 8:41pm

I mean 'ratio', not 'ration' there ;)

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Sigurd

Forum Moderator, 628 Posts

2 February 2009 at 12:01am

I hear you on all 3 points... I'll have a think later in Feb and add some feature requests.

TinyMCE does have a full-screen icon if you go to their site; you should find it fairly easy to patch in?

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Nivanka

Community Member, 400 Posts

2 February 2009 at 12:48am

thats something important to add the fullscreen button to the Content Editor.

I heard that the customization of tinymce will be easier in a newer version, but still didnt see anything about it.

There are lots of features that are not included in the SS content editor. Font family is one which I can remember ;)

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UncleCheese

Forum Moderator, 4102 Posts

3 February 2009 at 7:29am

Edited: 03/02/2009 7:30am

Font family doesn't belong in a WYSIWYG editor -- it belongs in your stylesheet. Otherwise clients have way too much control over look-and-feel and the site you or your designer put a lot of work into decays into your client's hellish sense of aesthetic. For these reasons, I think the WYSIWYG editor in Silverstripe is far too feature rich and it just leads to more problems than anything else. I'm constantly fixing broken and/or ugly pages because some ambitious user wanted to try out a new button.

Keep it simple and put as much as you can into custom objects on the template. That's what SS is built do to.

edit: You can move the NavigationLabel field by simply removing it from its tab and replacing it in Page.php.

$fields->removeByName('MenuTitle')
$fields->addFieldToTab("Root.Content.MetaData", new TextField('MenuTitle'));