Carl Maltby Posted June 1, 2016 Share Posted June 1, 2016 Hi all. I've become highly averse to using the template manager of late simply because of its awful state of usability. Being a fundamental way of controlling how site content is manipulated and indexed for users, this undermines the package at a very deep level. Do let me know if I am somehow over-reacting or missing something here....or chime in with your own comments.... I'll discuss my primary bugbear, which is the database templates....they are after all the bread and butter of a Pages-based site. groups of templates are easily created from default, but immensely tedious to delete one-by-one groups cannot be deleted en masse deleting one template from a group re-orders the group listing, easily causing template deletion from the wrong group there is no method of arranging templates into any sort of order beyond what the ACP arbitarily decides from minute to minute templates cannot be moved between groups or copied Obviously bringing problems to the table is nowhere near as useful as bringing solutions, I propose the following ideas: A "recycle bin" for templates and groups this could be implemented by simply "greying/redding-out" the group or templates in the tabbed listing A drag n' drop tree management system for arranging templates and groups into sense order Second-level nesting of templates I tend to arrange my templates by-database, for example "Articles" and "Tutorials". The current system requires that I either have an overly large first-level listing of "Article Form", "Article Category", "Article Display", etc. as groups or a single group containing all of these individual templates, including occurrences of identical names ("index"). A second-level listing would allow a group "Articles" and a logical group of "Category", "Display", etc. Common templates Reducing redundancy and inconsistency is a key job. For example, a simple templated method of displaying an element common to various database - such as a Category row - is replicated amongst every occurrence of Category templates. The option of setting a template (such as "Articles > categoryRow") as a clone of a common template (such as "common > categoryRow") would hugely reduce unnecessary template proliferation. Deleting a template with dependencies would of course need to be captured. In fairness, this is the tip of a very large and frustrating iceberg. Is everybody else finding the template manager unintuitive and slow to use? I'd rather be generating content instead of chasing around the template manager! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Management Lindy Posted June 7, 2016 Management Share Posted June 7, 2016 Improvements have been made in an upcoming release. Please check back and let us know your feedback at that time. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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