Do you have some feature in mind that you'd love to see in Couch? Let us know.
8 posts Page 1 of 1
Hi Guys,

First of all just like to say how much I'm enjoying using Couch. You've done really well in making a CMS which is both simple and powerful enough to accomplish the majority of requirements. Thanks!

One major feature which I feel is really missing on the product is the ability to order lists manually, i.e. not by sort method but by hand. While sorting by date / title / etc. is useful for things like blog posts, something like a portfolio often requires user defined ordering. In the project I am currently working on for example, my client will wants the ability to easily pick and choose which clients are shown in their portfolio page, and the order of these. Currently I can't provide this functionality without manually fiddling the dates on each - not very user friendly!

In my eyes the product could really benefit from an easy to use, drag and drop based ordering system. For example, jQuery's "Sortable" plugin gives this functionality very quickly, and looking at the database structure you use from what I can see all that would be needed is an additional "Custom Sort" field in the couch_pages table to hold a position value.

Any plans for something like this to be implemented soon?

Many thanks,
Barney Fox
Hi Mr. Fox,

Yours happens to be the second such request we've had in the past couple of days.
We'll certainly place this in our todo list.
Excellent, thanks for your quick response!

The same would be excellent to have for each section / page within the CMS. Currently they default to the order they were created, but obviously it makes more sense to have them in the same order they appear within the website.

If you have experience with mySQL a temporary solution exists already as there is a field named "k_order" within the "couch_templates" table. This appears to be the default ordering method, although all entries are blank. Assigning numeric values to each "k_order" field therefore allows you to order each CMS menu item yourself.
You can order the 'sections' (templates) if you so wish to.
You are right in observing that there is a k_order field in the table.
It can be set by using the 'order' parameter of the 'template' tag used within each template.
Code: Select all
<cms:template title='Events' clonable='1' order='4'>
...
</cms:tempate>

Bigger the number, the lower in order the template appears (you can use negative numbers too).
You can get more info about it in the documentation - http://www.couchcms.com/docs/tags-refer ... plate.html

Thank you for your inputs :) Please keep them coming.
I second this request!

I'm building my portfolio site using Couch and it would super if you guys could provide a way for me to set the order the pages appear in without me fiddling with the publish dates.
There is one other way of ordering the pages instead of fiddling with the dates - explicitly use an editable region for this purpose. e.g.
Code: Select all
<cms:editable name='my_sort_order' label='Sort order' 
   desc='Enter a numeric value. Bigger the number, lower the page appears in a list. Can use negative numbers.'
   search_type='integer'
   type='text' />

Notice how we have set the 'search_type' of this 'text' type region to 'numeric'. By doing this we can now use this for sorting.
The client can then assign each page a number that will define the page's position in listings.

Finally the code listing the pages can be modified to use this custom field, instead of the default publish-date, to set the sort order -
Code: Select all
<cms:pages orderby='my_sort_order' order='asc'>
   ...
</cms:pages>

A downside of this approach is that the order of the pages in the 'admin panel' still uses the publish dates. This might appear confusing to the client.

Perhaps you'd care to try this method out.
Hello there,

i have spent the last few days (like i do several times a year) searching for new CMS-solutions on the market. I have to admit: Couch is almost exactly what i am looking for.

I agree absolutely that a possibility to reorder items (newsarticles, portfolio-items etc.) by dragging is one of the things i am missing - if you could add this it would be fantastic! Anything new about this?

Another nice thing would be the integration of an alternative editor, maybe markdown?

Kind regards,

Christian
Hi Christian,

Welcome to our forums.

The upcoming release of Couch features 'Nested Pages' - i.e. instead of the folders we use the pages themselves to define an hierarchy. Very useful to create the hierarchy needed to create menus. This feature also has the provision to order the pages arbitrarily.

Another feature in the pipe-line is defining custom editable regions. This can be used to create the markdown editor you mentioned quite easily.

Stay tuned :)
8 posts Page 1 of 1