I want to customize the UI in TS 6.1 to hide some unnecessary complexity from my authors. I'm certain that its possible to do the things I want to do, but I need some advice on how much work they are to do, and hopefully some ideas about approaches to take. Armed with this knowledge, I can go to the "Powers That Be" and request some developer time to build it.
In the system we've built, we've decided to only use directory names for URLs. That is if a URL is "
http://www.example.com/Foo/Bar" the file that is loaded is /Foo/Bar/index.html. This means that the instructions we give for adding a new page to the site is:
- Navigate to the location where you want to create a new page
- Create a new folder using the name of the page as you want it to appear in the URL as the name of the folder
- Create a new form of the appropriate template type
- Generate a file name "index.html" in the directory you just created
This is a lot more steps than I want to give my users. It requires them to know more about our system than I'd like.
What i would like to do is modify the interface in such a way that we hide all the steps. The user would select "New Page" instead of "New Folder". We would then prompt them for the page name as it would appear in the URL and the name of the form to use to manage the page. We would then create the folder, a dummy generated page and an empty DCR, set the the extended attribues so everything is connected, launch the editor.
Another thing I'd like to do hide the fact that we have a directory and a file named index.html or index.jsp. Since our directories are only ever going to contain that index file. I want to represent the directories as files. If you look at the current browse behaviour in standard, I would eliminate the Folders section and show the directories in the same way as files are currently shown. I would make clicking the folder name navigate into that folder. I would have add "Preview" between "Edit" and "File Actions". I would change "File" to "Page" almost everyewhere.
I would also only want to do this for certain parts of the site only.
Third, some pages are made up of content that is managed in separate files. This might be to allow content to be used in multiple locations or to allow different business units to manage the content and the page. I would like to continue the changes above to also list, if appropriate, the included content and images referred to in the page document. These files would reside elsewhere within the site hierarchy but I want to list them here (perhaps adding another column with the actual path to the file. This will make it easier to work with content that is distributed around. Without this ability, if I wanted to assign the piece of content that in included in /Foo/Bar, i would have to navigate to /Foo/Bar, edit the file, find the path of the included file (assuming it has a sufficiently identifiable filename), close the editor, navigate to the file I found in the form, and finally assign that file to the author. If I can list all the files associated with the current page, its nearly trivial to this sort of thing.
The last thing I'd like to do is replace the often obscure file name with meaningful titles. For instance, an included file might have the file name "mktgpromo_20041102A.html" but i'd rather show "Homepage promo for Widget, Nov 2, 2004 to Nov 28, 2004" or something.
I appreciate any help and direction you can provide.
Adam
