Some ideas and wishes for better visual control over TV-display in the manager

[frischnetz]

Feature request

Summary

We have only very limited control over how the TVs are presented to the editor, even though they are very essential building blocks of the pages. Usual elements like sections, dividers, frames, longer explanatory text, columns, tabs, collapsible help text, etc. are needed, expecially when we have changing editors.

Why is it needed?

Overview:
It's important for the editors to find the most important TVs quickly. In the current state, all elements are of the same importance. Section headers and dividers could help. Also colors and symbols to show which TVs are mandatory.

Link TVs together
Thematically connected TVs need to be optically connected, too (like contact details). It also saves explanation space. This could be done with frames (like html-fieldset) or boxes, background color.

Columns would be a good way to save space for short TVs and provide better connection between TVs (e.g. contact details and portrait picture side-by-side).

Optional help
Longer explanatory text is often needed, but it should be collapsible for more experienced editors.

Guiding the Editor
It's very important to make decision paths clear to the editor: “You either need to fill in all the TVs in this block oder one the other one, not both.”

Suggested solution(s)

Some of the above wishes could be solved by dummy TVs, that are just

• section headers,
• extra (collapsible) text
• or horizontal dividers.

They could be sorted to be displayed between “real” TVs.

Connecting thematically linked TVs could be achieved by providing each TV with a choice of (light) background colors. When the colored backgrounds touch without gap, it implicitly looks like these fields are connected in a colored box, thus removing the need for defining start and end of a block.

Columns and tabs, etc. would need a deeper rewrite, I guess. A system to arrange the TVs like in the MODX3-dashboard would be phantastic.