Comments below... On 6/29/06, Allen Gilliland <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Matt Raible wrote: > On 6/29/06, Allen Gilliland <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> Hopefully we'll hear from a wider set of people about this, but I am >> still wondering what the use case is for these edit links. How are you >> guys actually using them? You actually move back and forth between the >> authoring interface and your rendered weblog to edit entries? > > Yes, I use it all the time for that. It's a force of habit more than > anything. If I was smart, I'd use two tabs, but after posting > thousands of blog entries, habits form. ;-)
We definitely got a very good reaction when we introduced those edit links. They are very convenient. It's easy to browse old entries and edit them when you find problems. You might arrive at an old entry after browing somebody else's blog and finding a link back to your blog, or after doing a google search or recieving a comment notification -- it's very convenient to be able to simply click the edit link to started editing. And there are other convenient things we could do like showing an unapproved comment count for each entry and a link to the entry's comment management page.
That was basically what I was thinking but couldn't articulate it for some reason. It does seem more to me like this is a feature that some people may be used to because it's there, not because there is a real need for it.
It's not just for preview. I use the edit link to go from old entries to the edit interface and I used the in-page editor-menu to access the bookmarks, settings, settings and other pages in the interface. I also use the toggle-linkback links to change visibility of linkbacks. Those things are a daily part of my Roller usage and I really do not want to see them go away. We've already made the caching of logged-in pages optional; doesn't that solve the problem that you are concerned about.
I can see a reason why you might publish and entry and go immediately to your blog page to take a final look at it, then decide you need to make an edit, but aside from the past entry or 2 i don't see why you would first login to the authoring interface and then navigate to your weblog so that you can edit an entry that is multiple days/months old. Or why you would login to the authoring interface and then navigate to your blog so that you can use the "Website:Settings" link there instead of just using the link on the main menu page of the authoring interface.
I spend time browing my blog, tweaking the them and moving back and forth between the editor interface and my blog. I'd like be able to do more of that not less.
In any case, as an alternative I would probably propose that instead of linking back and forth between the fully published weblog pages and the authoring interface that we instead expand the capabilities of the preview servlet to meet this need instead. The preview servlet seems like the ideal venue for this exact situation and can offer *way* more benefits since we can do things with the preview servlet which we wouldn't be able to do on the real pages. For example, perhaps the preview servlet should render draft entries so that the weblog author can see how their entry will fit in with the entire rendered page, rather than using the fairly simple entry preview mode that we have now? This way you can get a true preview of the way the entry will look, but without having to publish it first. Also, maybe we can find a way to setup the preview servlet so that it can render using unsaved template changes as well. That would be extremely beneficial since you would be able to work on templates without having to affect how your rendered blog looks. And on and on.
Yes! Absolutely. We should rip out the old preview feature and provide a real preview that shows the blog entry as it will appear on the blog. I think there are a lot of cool UI things we can do by knowing the logged in state of the user when we render the blog so I strongly object to removing that ability from the page models. We need to make the UI easier to use, so let's not short-change users just to save a little space in the cache. The blog itself is part of the user interface and I want to keep it that way. - Dave
