[Plone-UI] Placeless Adding help needed

Dylan Jay djay at pretaweb.com
Thu Feb 21 01:12:44 UTC 2013


Hi,

You might remember awhile back I talked about "Placeless Adding". Since then I have submitted it as PLIP and it was rejected on the grounds that the implementation wasn't accepted. Despite this, I believe that this issue is still something that needs to be addressed in Plone and I thought that it would be good to go back to the beginning and with the collective UX wisdom on this list, come up with a more acceptable solution to this problem.

Plone's UI for adding content for types that live in a specific location have some complexities which can be a frustration for users. Namely, users need to have special knowledge of where that content should be placed and in creating that content it requires many clicks to navigate to that section of the site and add the content. Wordpress sites prove to be far easier in this regard because the "blog post" type is immediately available on the front page though an "add post" button and represents 99% of the content adding content use cases.

In some larger sites the problem becomes far worse. Particularly where you have a front page composed of multiple content sources and types drawn from different parts of the site managed by different people. This was the case for one of our clients who operated one of the largest Plone sites in the world - we were not the implementers of this site but just giving support, however, they have recently decided to switch to another CMS for a variety of reasons. One of those reasons we can identify is that for content editors it had become complex to train and operate place sensitive content buried 3 or 4 levels deep. This situation needs lots of navigation clicks to jump between those sections of the site making the experience rather frustrating. Most users only had edit access to these specific sections.

As someone pointed out earlier, even in the initial Plone install we have an events folder and a news folder. You need to learn to go there to add those kinds of content. This seems natural to us but the concept of where you add something matters a lot, we have to teach every time to new users. Instead this could be simplified so that News only goes to the news folder and events only go the events folder and we had a way to make it easy to add either of those from anywhere. This should, I believe, make for a simpler experience and a more gentle introduction when coming from a different CMS.

Do you agree?

If so, whats the best UX to implement this?



Adam Terrey
Software Engineer
PretaWeb

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Email me at adam.terrey at pretaweb.com
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