I agree with most of these changes, but here's a few things I don't
really like ...
1. On the templates list page I don't think we need the column for the
content-type. The overwhelming majority of users don't care about
manually managing the content type for their templates so I think we
want to keep that completely hidden and only available in that advanced
settings section.
2. On the templates list page I don't like having 2 columns which are
links. To me that is confusing and bad usability, so I think that only
the template name should be a link. In fact, I don't think we need to
have the "link" column in the templates list page at all. I don't
really think it adds much value and we are best off just making things
as simple as possible.
So with #1 and #2 applied I think that the templates list page should
just include Name, Description, and the icon for locked/delete. This is
a good thing too because it will leave more room for better
descriptions, which is something I think we should do for our
standardized templates like the Weblog template.
3. I would put the content-type and template language controls as the
first 2 elements under the advanced settings page.
4. I think the content-type control should work differently than you
described. I think the only 2 options should be "automatic" and
"manual". So for automatic content-type it would work exactly how it
does now where we ask the appserver for the content type based on the
link value and text/html is the default. For manual we just provide a
textfield for the user to specify whatever they want. Default would be
for automatic content-type detection. And with the automatic
content-type detection we would actually do that at the time the form is
submitted rather than at rendering time like we do now.
-- Allen
Dave wrote:
This is a proposal to make some minor usability and functionality
improvements to the UI of the Template Editor pages. The functionality
improvements allow a user to set the content-type and language for a
page, with together make it possible to take advantage of the Roller
rendering system's pluggable renderers.
Screen-shots included in proposal:
http://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/ROLLER/Proposal_TemplateEditorEnhancements
Please review, I'd like to commit this work this week.
- Dave
