'groups' within 'groups'?
I am sorry, but not currently possible.

Is this something we can expect in an upcoming release?

It would really open up the panel in terms of managing editables/data and grouping. I could also see several design improvements that could be made if editable region groups were able to have child groups.

[KK]

To be honest, Dave, I personally never found myself needing this kind of nesting. Neither, if memory serves me right, has any one else requested this feature before. So I never gave this arrangement any thought.

That said, I am open to discussing this with you and, if possible, make the required changes.

For that, could you please post some mockups of use-cases where you see nested groups useful?
Also, exactly what kind of behavior do you expect from the 'child' groups? Do they collapse/expand like top level groups or behave differently?

Please expand on this so as to make me see what you have in mind for this feature.

Thanks.

For that, could you please post some mockups of use-cases where you see nested groups useful?
Also, exactly what kind of behavior do you expect from the 'child' groups? Do they collapse/expand like top level groups or behave differently?

Please expand on this so as to make me see what you have in mind for this feature.
.

Sure, KK. Thanks for listening. I will do my best to describe a few use-cases for this while keeping my reply short.

The first example is where it first propped up, for me. I have a homepage that has a lot of large sections of content on it, mostly just paragraphs etc. There are a few sections that have inner groups of content, for example - one section has 3 icons, each icon has 3 editables related to it. (Title, image and richtext). At the current time, I am forced to make a decision - either have one group in the admin panel with all 3 icon groups inside it, that's 9 editable regions inside the group. While it works, it's bloody confusing It would be a LOT cleaner to be able to group these editables within the group they're in.

Another (and more important) example. I wish to some time take a dig at customising the admin panel. Honestly, the sidebar is pretty good in my opinion, and I doubt I'd want to change it much. For me, customising is all about the on-page layout. I think it's limited by the fact that it is doing it's job (Displaying data to the user and making it available to be managed). But there isn't much room to structure the data outside of just grouping editables in the current groups. I'd love to be able to group a bunch of editables inside of their respective groups, then put each of those groups in one main group and design my page around this.

I suppose, in my opinion, it opens up a lot of options for managing the output of the editable regions on the page. It's not something that's previously been important because the old admin panel had many, many more problems than this. It's definitely something I was really hoping for when I saw the new way of defining groups -

Code: Select all

<cms:editable name='icons' label='Icons' desc='On-page icon data' type='group'>
   <cms:editable name='editable_grouping1' label='Icon1' desc='Icon number 1 editables' type='group'>
       ...Editables in here for the icon (Image upload, title textbox, richtext description).
   </cms:editable>


</cms:editable>

I've seen more and more uses for this as I've been using V2. With the other changes it would vastly improve the way in which we can group and handle data per template in the panel.

Do let me know if you need more examples, or more use cases for this. Thanks KK.

[KK]

Thanks Dave.

Could you please take the time to create a 'visual' mockup of the kind of screen you invisage?
For example, you may tweak a screenshot of the current admin-panel to make it show the regions as you described.

That would help me in contemplating as to what needs to be done.

[cheesypoof]

This is exactly the problem I had in mind when I originally mocked up the tab bar for the new admin panel. The idea being that one could define tabs, into which different editable regions could be placed as desired.

Here is my amazing paint skills at work:




Theoretically, each folder would have a class indicating it's level. This opens up wide opportunities when people come to customize the editable region layout on the page when customizing the panel.

Nice painting, Dave!

[KK]

Thanks Dave

As @cheesypoof alluded, do you think using tabs instead of nested groups could also serve the purpose?

@KK I'm not really sure. I could see them providing some way to help manage data, but in some ways they are restricting in terms of custom themes. I can see a use for tabs with content, but I wouldn't use them myself for something as trivial as the example in the screenshot, because a complete tab area just for some icons seems a little overkill for the problem.

With that said, I could see the tabs being useful. It would be really useful to have tabs for other stuff, for example - to keep all of a templates SEO editables, or to hide data that isn't needed by the average admin/editor. The nested groups however is a way to structure and provide data to make it easier to see exactly what you want to edit and get to it without being overwhelmed by a lot of groups/editables.

Another thing the groups provide over the tabs (And the main reason that I wanted this feature in the first place) is when I do get around to editing the on-page theme for the admin panel, I want to use groups to structure my data per template using some CSS and other methods I could then structure the page based on whether the group is top-level or a child of another group.

So, I see a place for both solutions to help structure data and to offer extensible solutions to structuring data on the admin pages, which along with the sidebar, was always the two biggest issues with the 1.4.x panel. But I don't think either of the discussed methods is a good solution for the whole issue, because I think they both help to tackle different areas of it.

P.S. One thing I really want to see in the near-future and with the tabs @Cheesypoof mentioned is a way to group templates! For example, I often have templates defined just to define the editable regions to be used on a cloned-templates list-view. The only viable solutions to this previously has been to create another template with just some editable regions in it, or create one master-template for all list-view editables. Either way, it's tricky to manage them on the panel, even if they're listed next to eachother in the sidebar, or under their own group in the sidebar - it's still a bad flow of data management. I'd love to one day be able to select a template as the child of a cloned template, or some way tell couch that a template is there just to hold editables for another templates views. Then have couch output those editables inside of one of the tabs @cheesypoof mentioned!

[KK]

Dave, @cheesypoof's original vision for the tabs was/is to use them for grouping editable regions in edit-view.
My take was to leave the tabs for 'dependent' templates. A snippet from our conversation -

For list-views, the tabs can link to associated templates like e.g. 'global' values for the template or 'tags' template.

For edit-view, what I have in mind is to use the tabs for 'reverse-related' templates e.g. we can show all images from 'gallery template related to the page being edited. Or, for example, all 'orders' of the 'customer' being edited.

I think that is precisely what you are asking for.

So the current status seems to be that we still have to figure out the best way of grouping editable regions and dependent templates.

Anyway, it may be reassuring for you to know that the features you requested are on the cards Can't promise exactly when they get implemented, though.