#180: Add a RichText field to Smart Folders

Contents
  1. Motivation
  2. Proposal
by Jon Stahl — last modified May 31, 2007 12:55 AM

Smart Folders would be much more flexible in real-world deployments if there was a RichText field before the results listing.

Proposed by
Jon Stahl
Proposal type
User interface
Assigned to release
State
completed

Motivation

Smart Folders is an insanely useful feature for building pages that list query results.

However, in real-world situations, a site editor will often want to preface the listing with some richly formatted text.

Smart Folders currently allow only a "description."

Adding a RichText field to Smart Folder would make it much, much more versatile, and reduce the need for subclassing.

Proposal

David "Siebo" Siedband has already implemented this in his "RichTopic" product.

Agree

Posted by Christoffer Torris Olsen at Dec 26, 2006 04:08 AM
I used this approach in a recent project for an organisation. All the local branches where given Smart Folder frontpages with static RichText field and a news listing of published articles under them as default, and it works well. In addition I made a tick field where the local administrator could choose to show this text field or the top news article larger, but that's too specific :-)

Agree, but...

Posted by Christian Schneider at Feb 13, 2007 12:23 AM
... wouldn't it make sense to give the page an optional "show listing" button or something? That one could also be applied to normal folders. I often miss having the folder listing and a text box in the content area at the same time. I usually have a folder, hook it up to a default page and then modify some view so that the page can show the folder contents if I want. Of course the smart folder would have to get a "default page" option and maybe the navtree should display folder contents of smart folders like it does show the contents of normal folders. It would keep the smart folders and folders somewhat "clean" while still enabling the use of some fancy text.

…no button

Posted by Geir Baekholt at Feb 15, 2007 10:43 AM
don't use content editing forms for defining the layout. Different layouts should be implemented with the selectable views. More views for smart folders can be useful.