Possible new interface for 'Parent' field in page authoring interface

[docomo]

Hi,

I have been playing alot with CMSMS, and looking at how i would use it too set up some sites .... in particular I'm looking at setting up a site for a community organisation which could grow quite large in size (in terms of number of pages).

For me, one possible way of improving the page authoring interface for large sites, is to used a 'Parent' field selection drop-down which doesn't present all of the parents at one time. I had in mind a DHTML drop down which lets the use 'expand/collapse' nodes on the tree.

(See screenshot.jpg image attached for e.g.).

I built a similiar DHTML dropdown for a recent project, and adapted it too look how i imagined such a drop down to look in CMSMS. I have whipped up the HTML, CSS and Javascript framework to render such a control (see 4 attached files - copy 'ParentPickerTest.txt' into a root folder and rename to 'ParentPickerTest.htm', and '.gif' files into 'images' folder under this to run demo).

Let me know if you think it would be a worthwhile inclusion, or if you can see any improvements to the interface. If you think it's worth doing - i'll try and work out how to incorporate it into CMSMS in april (i'm away most of feb and march, and i have to learn php first ....)

Btw. i''ve tested this in IE 6, Firefox 1.5 and Opera 8.5 (on Win XP) and it seems to work fine.

Cheers

> michael

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[docomo]

Oh btw, here is a screenshot of what the DHTML drop down would look like:

(see attachment 'screenshot.JPG')

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[docomo]

No worries Patricia

I agree with you about js, alot of people/companies do disable them. And javascript has a way of behaving differently on different browsers - especially given the number of different platforms and browsers used by cmsms authors/developers.

I look forward to seeing the next version of cmsms - it's sounding pretty cool.

Cheers

> michael