I did a few tests on current master since I wanted to try a few things that bugged me in 7.3.2 and found that quite a bit has changed. I found several nice changes. As usual, I still have some thoughts. ;)
Drop zones: Dragging & dropping of widgets was improved. Thanks, I missed quite often with 7.3.2 and I believe, it behaves a bit better now. But maybe the drop indicator could become more visible. I am not sure what's best here, a bit thicker (5 or 6 instead of 4px perhaps?) or maybe a different color to contrast it against the widget border. I tried it with red, its a bit brutal, but it becomes really visible.
Menu icons (Menu & a bit global menu)
I really like it when I can toggle a pane without moving with the mouse. Click Open. Click Close. Without moving the mouse. But currently, I have to move the mouse to click the "Menu" toggle. It is a minor thing, but bugs me for a while now. It nearly works for the global menu, but the X icon is a bit "off", just a few pixels.
Edit mode and back button:
Maybe it is just me, but when I want to close the menu, I click the back button all the time. I am not sure if this is just me and everybody else is perfectly fine with it. No idea, I just wanted to mention it. Maybe the buttons could be moved apart? I don't know, maybe there is no help and my brain is just glued to the idea that an arrow to the left will close the pane ...
Site templates: The default site templates still create/consist of widget pages. Shouldn't they changed to content pages?
"New" Navigation tree: It is there for a while now, but still, the position feels wrong to me. Maybe the icon should move to the top bar, two icons , one, opening the site config/content management and one opening the tree. It works and is quite an improvement to 7.2 but it could be better.
Navigation & public/private pages:
Also, I had to create a public and a private pages for a showcase and I regularly switched between the sites. It seems, the component remembers my last selection, public or private but independent of the site. Now, when I switched sites, it was quite often wrong and showed me an empty navigation and I had to switch to public/private pages. This usecase could be an edge case, I am not sure, how many customers have both public/private sites. But I believe it would be more useful, if the site with existing pages would be preferred or if it would remember my choice per site.
Page edit, Look & Feel
I noticed that "Look & Feel" seems to be gone. Well, bon voyage, I won't miss you.
New Fragments and Widgets panel: AWESOME. I love it. A lot cleaner. Quick question, not a big deal: Is it possible to add our own icons instead of lexicon icons? I am not sure if we will that anyway since it is hard to find fitting icons (and then in the same style).
New Global menu
In general: Very nice! I believe it was good to split the menu and even though it is probably not final at the moment, I'd like to throw in a few thoughts/ideas.
The Sites submenu (grey area) is nice, very helpful. Maybe the Global entry should be "marked" somehow with a special icon, since global is never "recently visited".
The two "Sites" menus could be merged (the one from control panel and the grey one). It might be convenient from a technical point of view to keep the Control Panel/Sites menu, but please allow me to directly open the sites management page. Oh, and since I am talking about sites: The German translation of "Sites" is incorrect in the menu. "Seiten" means "Pages". (I forgot where the translation are managed)
Just use "Sites".
That said, the new huge menu feels a bit inconvenient. In my experience, I most often need things in the Control Panel. Now I have to click on the right (Global Menu icon), move with the mouse back to the left and switch tab. I am not sure what the best solution is, maybe two icons instead of one icon + two tabs? Or even three, split it further in Users & Accounts, Control Area, Applications. Thinkng of it, maybe the whole experience should actually become more like ribbons in Office, an icon for each of the major areas. There is a lot of free real estate available there ...
A quick fix could be to simply move the tabs to the right.
A small change that would decrease mouse paths quite a bit.
Shortcuts:
A "Shortcuts" column would be nice. I often need Users, Roles, System/Instance Settings and a few more, but I never use most of the menus.
Drop zones: Dragging & dropping of widgets was improved. Thanks, I missed quite often with 7.3.2 and I believe, it behaves a bit better now. But maybe the drop indicator could become more visible. I am not sure what's best here, a bit thicker (5 or 6 instead of 4px perhaps?) or maybe a different color to contrast it against the widget border. I tried it with red, its a bit brutal, but it becomes really visible.
Menu icons (Menu & a bit global menu)
I really like it when I can toggle a pane without moving with the mouse. Click Open. Click Close. Without moving the mouse. But currently, I have to move the mouse to click the "Menu" toggle. It is a minor thing, but bugs me for a while now. It nearly works for the global menu, but the X icon is a bit "off", just a few pixels.
Edit mode and back button:
Maybe it is just me, but when I want to close the menu, I click the back button all the time. I am not sure if this is just me and everybody else is perfectly fine with it. No idea, I just wanted to mention it. Maybe the buttons could be moved apart? I don't know, maybe there is no help and my brain is just glued to the idea that an arrow to the left will close the pane ...
Site templates: The default site templates still create/consist of widget pages. Shouldn't they changed to content pages?
"New" Navigation tree: It is there for a while now, but still, the position feels wrong to me. Maybe the icon should move to the top bar, two icons , one, opening the site config/content management and one opening the tree. It works and is quite an improvement to 7.2 but it could be better.
Navigation & public/private pages:
Also, I had to create a public and a private pages for a showcase and I regularly switched between the sites. It seems, the component remembers my last selection, public or private but independent of the site. Now, when I switched sites, it was quite often wrong and showed me an empty navigation and I had to switch to public/private pages. This usecase could be an edge case, I am not sure, how many customers have both public/private sites. But I believe it would be more useful, if the site with existing pages would be preferred or if it would remember my choice per site.
Page edit, Look & Feel
I noticed that "Look & Feel" seems to be gone. Well, bon voyage, I won't miss you.
New Fragments and Widgets panel: AWESOME. I love it. A lot cleaner. Quick question, not a big deal: Is it possible to add our own icons instead of lexicon icons? I am not sure if we will that anyway since it is hard to find fitting icons (and then in the same style).
New Global menu
In general: Very nice! I believe it was good to split the menu and even though it is probably not final at the moment, I'd like to throw in a few thoughts/ideas.
The Sites submenu (grey area) is nice, very helpful. Maybe the Global entry should be "marked" somehow with a special icon, since global is never "recently visited".
The two "Sites" menus could be merged (the one from control panel and the grey one). It might be convenient from a technical point of view to keep the Control Panel/Sites menu, but please allow me to directly open the sites management page. Oh, and since I am talking about sites: The German translation of "Sites" is incorrect in the menu. "Seiten" means "Pages". (I forgot where the translation are managed)
Just use "Sites".
That said, the new huge menu feels a bit inconvenient. In my experience, I most often need things in the Control Panel. Now I have to click on the right (Global Menu icon), move with the mouse back to the left and switch tab. I am not sure what the best solution is, maybe two icons instead of one icon + two tabs? Or even three, split it further in Users & Accounts, Control Area, Applications. Thinkng of it, maybe the whole experience should actually become more like ribbons in Office, an icon for each of the major areas. There is a lot of free real estate available there ...
A quick fix could be to simply move the tabs to the right.
A small change that would decrease mouse paths quite a bit.
Shortcuts:
A "Shortcuts" column would be nice. I often need Users, Roles, System/Instance Settings and a few more, but I never use most of the menus.
Hey Christoph,
Thanks once again for the thoughtful feedback.
You keep surprising me with your ability to stay on top of our development and even correctly guess our intentions and direction
We are processing all of your feedback and I hope we'll be able to apply some of your ideas for GA4 or right after.
Thanks!
Jorge
Thanks once again for the thoughtful feedback.
You keep surprising me with your ability to stay on top of our development and even correctly guess our intentions and direction
We are processing all of your feedback and I hope we'll be able to apply some of your ideas for GA4 or right after.Thanks!
Jorge
Only time will tell I think. For websites yes I think your point is perfectly valid. For Intranets I think Liferay is starting to loose focus on Intranet needs. Most of our pages are currently maintained with consistency with web content templates. Although fragments are an evolution of this, I still maintain that fragmennts could have been Web Content 3.0.
My personal take on all this which I think is already becoming more well known ... it's taking longer to do things. Take these titles for example, in web content. So in 7.0 a user has a title already in the web content article, they can choose to display this title or hide with with the look and feel options (I used a decorator). So these decorators now don't work in content pages.
The problem now is instead of turning the title on and off, now the user must drag over a "heading" let's say. Now if they make layout changes in the content page what you've done by imposing this "new world of web design" on that user is you've doubled their workload (which in fairness is my workload, because I have to fix it right?). So to move a piece of content ... they have to move it and then move the "heading" because someone thought it was better to have two things instead of one.
Like I say I don't think time will prove me wrong, I'd like to be proven wrong, but compare the time it takes to do things with widget pages and web content templates to the extra time it now takes users and developers to do anything with content pages ... I think there will be calls to make the authoring experience faster.
Also by allowing such freedom with these content pages, without tightly controlled page templates or master pages ... the whole idea of brand consistency goes out of the window. When users can decide to do whatever, you actually loose consistency and I think when comparing widget pages to content pages, I think there will be a lack of consistency in what was made with content pages verses widget pages.
At the end of the day though, users will want the best of BOTH worlds, they will want to use blog portlets and message boards (Intranet usecase) on content pages and I really feel that leveling up the two and allowing widget pages to be fully functional on content pages can help use remove widget pages.
I like content pages ... but I think it's faaaaaaaar too soon to make content pages the go to. Even between GA3 and GA4 there is so much difference in content pages in the UI ... It's not yet finished. Put a time on it, say by 2022 having started this work in 2018, come out and say that content pages are not ready for maybe the next year. Those poor 7.1 users
It's close but I just can't believe there are things still with web content displays that don't work. Still.
Our users won't map web content fields to paragraphs ... it's too much time. You gotta think that the enthusiasts will and the people like me that do this day in day out will use and take hours to do one thing, but it's not acceptable for our users to take even more time out of their day to maintain their content, they have other work to do, so making things more time consuming and harder and putting up barriers to "getting work done" and making it harder for us portal admins to tweak a bit of look and feel ad-hoc ... it's really going to drag on productivity.
My personal take on all this which I think is already becoming more well known ... it's taking longer to do things. Take these titles for example, in web content. So in 7.0 a user has a title already in the web content article, they can choose to display this title or hide with with the look and feel options (I used a decorator). So these decorators now don't work in content pages.
The problem now is instead of turning the title on and off, now the user must drag over a "heading" let's say. Now if they make layout changes in the content page what you've done by imposing this "new world of web design" on that user is you've doubled their workload (which in fairness is my workload, because I have to fix it right?). So to move a piece of content ... they have to move it and then move the "heading" because someone thought it was better to have two things instead of one.
Like I say I don't think time will prove me wrong, I'd like to be proven wrong, but compare the time it takes to do things with widget pages and web content templates to the extra time it now takes users and developers to do anything with content pages ... I think there will be calls to make the authoring experience faster.
Also by allowing such freedom with these content pages, without tightly controlled page templates or master pages ... the whole idea of brand consistency goes out of the window. When users can decide to do whatever, you actually loose consistency and I think when comparing widget pages to content pages, I think there will be a lack of consistency in what was made with content pages verses widget pages.
At the end of the day though, users will want the best of BOTH worlds, they will want to use blog portlets and message boards (Intranet usecase) on content pages and I really feel that leveling up the two and allowing widget pages to be fully functional on content pages can help use remove widget pages.
I like content pages ... but I think it's faaaaaaaar too soon to make content pages the go to. Even between GA3 and GA4 there is so much difference in content pages in the UI ... It's not yet finished. Put a time on it, say by 2022 having started this work in 2018, come out and say that content pages are not ready for maybe the next year. Those poor 7.1 users
It's close but I just can't believe there are things still with web content displays that don't work. Still. Our users won't map web content fields to paragraphs ... it's too much time. You gotta think that the enthusiasts will and the people like me that do this day in day out will use and take hours to do one thing, but it's not acceptable for our users to take even more time out of their day to maintain their content, they have other work to do, so making things more time consuming and harder and putting up barriers to "getting work done" and making it harder for us portal admins to tweak a bit of look and feel ad-hoc ... it's really going to drag on productivity.
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