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#127: Move properties to Edit screen using pre-loaded fieldsets
- Contents
- Proposed by
- Alexander Limi
- Seconded by
- Florian Schulze
- Proposal type
- User interface
- Assigned to release
- Repository branch
- plip127-fieldsets
- State
- completed
Motivation
Currently, the Properties view on a content object is cumbersome to get to – you almost always want to edit it along with the normal properties anyway – and has become a random mix of items that are not important enough to be on the main edit screen - but are important enough to be on the object itself.
We should consolidate these on the edit screen, and have a clickable legend area that can be used to navigate around the different schemata used to represent the item.
Proposal
- Merge the dhtml-schemata branch, so we can have schemata without reloading the page (if this isn't already done by the time work on this starts).
- Improve the look of the schemata selector
- Group the Properties attributes better, maybe create 2-3 schemata of it if necessary.
Risks
- There should be little risk involved in this, since the dhtml-schemata branch requires that you explicitly turn it on, thus the few use cases that require schemata 1 to be filled out before you can go to schemata 2 will still work.
- There is some risk involved with Kupu if we enable it by default, though - there are reported problems since Kupu lives in an iframe. We need to make sure it works, both with editors on different pages and several editors at the same time.
Progress log
All parts of this are implemented in the plip 127 branches of Plone, ATCT and Archetypes.
The dhtml-schemata branch was not used, instead content types can be marked with the IMultiPageSchema interface to keep the old behaviour.
The properties tab was removed and the metadata schema can always be selected on the edit page for old types.
The javascript and css parts in Plone are done.
Multiple objects edit
+1 for enabling multiple object edits. Being able to configure effective date, keywords, etc on multiple objects I think would be a boon to Plone, especially with more and more products, etc being able to bulk import.
Providers
I would suggest a slightly more generic solution that composes the fieldsets by looking up any number of schema providers for the current context, probably as named adapters. Thus, you could register a new schema provider that provides a certain set of metadata. We would need to integrate this with the validation and storage machinery. Most likely, this would be a generic interface, implemented primarily in Archetypes.
Definitely needed
I was thinking along the same lines today as created a ton of objects/pages and had to use the Edit and Properties view on each and everyone.
Along these lines, I'd also like to be able to select multiple items from the Contents view and click on a "Change Properties" button much like you can click on a "Change State" button so that the same property values can be applied to several objects at once.