Folders, Galleries, & Pages content blocks do not allow editing of selections
Jtring
Registered Users Posts: 675 Major grins
Suppose on some page I create a content block that has one content type. Let's use the "Folders" content block type as an example. Suppose further I chose Select From = "Folders|Choose" in the pop-up box that opens via the wrench icon and then select some number of folders using the "Choose one or more folders" page that appears when I click the next item down in the pop-up box. If I then close and save everything and repeat the process, the folders I selected originally are still there when I return to the "Choose one or more folders" page. I can modify the selection, remove some, or reorder the list with the help of the SELECTED button at the top right. That's all works well enough.
The same applies to content blocks just for galleries and just for pages.
BUT when I try the same procedure for the content block type that combines Folders, Galleries, & Pages, this doesn't work. The items I select one time are not remembered when I work my way back to the "Choose one or more pages, folders or galleries" page a second time. I have to reselect from scratch. So there is no way to reorder or add or remove one item except to re-do the whole thing.
That's annoying, and more to the point, it is sufficiently inconsistent with the handling of the other content block types that it looks to be a bug.
Since I've not unveiled my new site, only the SM folks can see my examples. However, they can look at Test Page on jtringl.smugmug.com where I have all four content block types. The same behavior shows on my sandbox home page. It has one Folders content block and one Folders, Galleries & Pages content block.
Jim Ringland
The same applies to content blocks just for galleries and just for pages.
BUT when I try the same procedure for the content block type that combines Folders, Galleries, & Pages, this doesn't work. The items I select one time are not remembered when I work my way back to the "Choose one or more pages, folders or galleries" page a second time. I have to reselect from scratch. So there is no way to reorder or add or remove one item except to re-do the whole thing.
That's annoying, and more to the point, it is sufficiently inconsistent with the handling of the other content block types that it looks to be a bug.
Since I've not unveiled my new site, only the SM folks can see my examples. However, they can look at Test Page on jtringl.smugmug.com where I have all four content block types. The same behavior shows on my sandbox home page. It has one Folders content block and one Folders, Galleries & Pages content block.
Jim Ringland
Jim Ringland . . . . . jtringl.smugmug.com
0
Comments
http://jrogers.smugmug.com
-julian
www.julianbutler.com
Jim Ringland
jtringl.smugmug.com
Please check out my gallery of customisations for the New SmugMug, more to come!
With the recent fixes on keywords and quick settings, this is now at the top of my needs-fixing list. Yes, I know, others might put something else #1. But I hit against this every time I update the Folders/Galleries/Pages content block I use for my Featured Galleries ... and mutter a few choice words each time.
More than that, being able to edit the F/G/P widget is arguably the missing link in making the richer SM structure, with its multiple levels of folders and separate pages, smoothly useable. There have been situations in the last few months where it would have been natural for me to introduce an extra level of folders and create galleries one level deeper so as to keep them small and more narrowly focused. I've held off -- producing larger, less focused galleries at a higher folder level instead -- because doing so would mean introducing mixed folder/gallery display widgets in a couple of places and having to update them when I add galleries. Of course I could just dig in and deal with the complexity, but I'd rather work with the SM interface structure, most of which works well for me, than be continually fighting against one piece of it.
Jim Ringland
jtringl.smugmug.com
I would say everything is just perfect in the new Smugmug (at least for me) but this... My site focuses on a main page (http://dosmildreams.smugmug.com/Main) where I feature my best folders & galleries. Obviously I need to update it every now and then, and selecting items every time just makes no sense. And second, I'd like to be able to order the items whenever I wish...
The recent bug whereby a return from the Lightbox moves one to the top of a gallery in Collage Landscape mode, rather than the current image, makes this one worse for me. A good way around the Lightbox bug -- and good display practice in general -- would be to keep the galleries small. For me, small related galleries would naturally fit in a folder that would live at the same level in the database tree as small unrelated galleries. But the inability to have an edit-able navigation content box that contains both galleries and folders would make having such a varied-level structure a real pain to maintain.
And it's not as if most of the code isn't there, at least in some related form. The folders/galleries/pages navigation content box remembers the selections and lets one edit and reorder while it is open ... but only after building a selection. The individual folder, gallery, and page navigation content boxes have the same selection box and reload it when re-entering the selection tool. Uniquely, the f/g/p selector doesn't reload.
This is my #1 desired fix / desired feature (whatever you want to call it). More than anything else, this one's holding me back. Please, please, complete hooking up the f/g/p content block selector.
Jim Ringland
jtringl.smugmug.com
Fixed. Folders, Galleries & Pages content block should now retain the previously selected items.
I really appreciate this.
Please check out my gallery of customisations for the New SmugMug, more to come!
Sorry, NOT FIXED. In some ways the situation is worse than before.
I tried this out this morning. There are some problems and bugs to work, partly with managing the order of the selection, but in some cases with successfully editing. (Testing was done in Chrome 36 but I did some spot-checking in Firefox 30 and saw identical behavior. I did the usual cookie-and-cache clean-out just in case.)
The remembered selections come up in alphabetical order, not the old selected order. If alphabetical is not the order you want, there will be problems.
Adding a new selection puts it at the end of the alphabetized list if one opens up the selection box. If one adds a new item to the selection, then deselects all in the selection box and reselects in the attempt to get a desired non-alphabetical order, the whole editing process fails. The selection reverts to what it was before attempting to edit. The new item is not added even though it shows in the selection box. The same applies if one deselects/reselects some but not all. (Note that by totally avoiding the selection box, it is possible to add a new item to the end of the list without damaging the existing order.)
If one deletes an item in the selection box, it is removed and the list will show in the new alphabetical order, not the the selected order before editing. If one deselects all and tries to reselect all except the one that was be be deleted, so as to restore the original selected order, once again the whole editing process fails. The selection reverts to what it was before attempting to edit.
There is no way that I can see to reorder an existing selection. If one deselects and reselects, attempting just to reorder an existing list fails.
Just opening the selection box, doing nothing, and mindlessly hitting the "done" buttons rather than "cancel" can destroy the original selected order. Not exactly friendly behavior.
The only way I have found to have a non-alphabetical order is to avoid the selection box altogether: just select items from the whole catalog in the desired order. That's exactly what one did before the change. In other words, if you don't want to display items in alphabetical order, because of the bugs, this fix does nothing to address the use case it was intended to improve.
A few of these changes have been applied to the selection widgets for just folder and just page content boxes. The folder and page selection boxes now come up in alphabetical order, but here de-selecting and re-selecting does allow one to restore the original order. No edits fail. That, of course, adds extra steps that weren't there. The use case of inserting one new item into the middle of a long, otherwise acceptably-ordered selection is now considerably more complex than before. The net result is that the situation for folder and page content boxes is worse than before.
Mercifully, the gallery widget selection appears to be unchanged.
The request was to make the f/p/g content block work like the individual folder, gallery or page blocks once did (and the galley block still does). That hasn't happened. Content block behavior is now more inconsistent from type to type than before. May I suggest you revert to the pre-change situation and try again. And maybe be just a bit more rigorous on the QA/testing.
(One added note. Before this fix the f/p/g selection box worked fine within its limitations once populated. It allowed for reordering and didn't enforce alphabetization. It just didn't get repopulated when opened. So even for the f/p/g content box, there has been a decrease in functionality if one doesn't want an alphabetized list.)
More oddities. The statement quoted above f/g/p content boxes was based on the 12-item content block, containing folders and galleries, on my Featured Galleries page. I used that block for all my testing. However, I just checked what would happen with the 5-item f/g/p content block, containing only pages at the moment, at the bottom of my Browse All page. There, although the selections comes up with items alphabetized, I can reorder successfully by de-selecting all and re-selecting in the desired sequence. I don't claim to know why this different behavior occurs. Mixed types versus a single type inside the f/g/p block? Number of items?
I apologize for causing confusion, and I have removed the fixed tag. Very sorry, I was trying to help but I clearly did the wrong thing.
--- Denise
Musings & ramblings at https://denisegoldberg.blogspot.com
No apology needed. I posted the thank you before testing. If anything, I jumped too fast.
More oddities, round 2. Experimentation suggests that if a f/g/p content block contains
- only folders,
- only pages,
- folders and pages only, or
- all three types,
then it is possible to reorder by deselecting and reselecting in the selection box.If a f/g/p content block contains
- only galleries,
- galleries and folders only, or
- galleries and pages only,
then it is not possible to reorder.Truly some odd code interactions are at work here!
BTW, all the comments in my first "not fixed" post were based on testing a block that contained galleries and folders only. And, of course, the reasonable behavior would be to allow deselect/reselect reordering AND have the selection box retain the original selection order (i.e., not alphabetize) so no or minimal reordering is necessary ... as is still the case for the galleries content block.
- If you open the Choose… page and close it without doing anything via a Done, then the previously selected order is gone and the items are alphabetized. That seems an odd side effect for doing nothing.
- If you open the Choose… page, de-select an item, and close via a Done, then the original items, minus the one removed, are alphabetized. Again, changing the order seems an odd side-effect when the only user action was to remove an item on the Choose… page and not even open the Selection Editing Box which shows the order.
- If you add new items to the selection on the Choose… page, and then close via a Done, the original items are alphabetized and the new items are at the end in the order selected. That’s a design choice, but it seems an odd default.
Still, even with the extra step of using the Selection Editing Box to restore the old order, this is an improvement. Before you had to build the list from scratch by jumping around the whole database. Now you only have to jump around among the selected items.This behavior applies to the folders widget, the pages widget, and the combined folders/galleries/pages widget, but not the galleries widget. The latter keeps the original order. That seems a much better approach. Deleting an item or adding one at the end is trivially simple. It you want the add an item someplace else, some work is needed, but it’s way less convoluted. You first open the Selection Editing Box, deselect the added item, and deselect all the old items you want to place after the added item. They are in the original order so no bouncing around is needed. Then you re-select the added item and re-select the old items you had de-selected at the earlier. Since the old order is there, no bouncing around is needed to select them in the old order. There is no need to reconstruct the old order from memory or notes. It’s right in front of you.
So …
First, I’d like to thank SmugMug for the improvements. Despite the problems, what we have now is better than before.
Second, I’d like to suggest SmugMug make all the widgets behave like the galleries widget and not re-order/alphabetize the existing items when entering the Choose Page. Just retain the existing order. Doing so removes the odd side-effect of reordering when just opening and closing the Choose Page. Doing so makes the use-case for simple additions and removals much, much easier. Doing so makes the behavior of all the widget types consistent.
(See also the related thread: Improved 'Items I Choose' interface.)
I hope someone from smug is reading this thread and will respond.
If someone can point out what I am missing in the ability to reorder entries without reselecting I would be very happy!
--- Denise
Musings & ramblings at https://denisegoldberg.blogspot.com
I did some more checking, and now I'm really confused as to what's going on. The deselect/reselect approach I described using the sidebar Selection Editing Box works for the 5-item f/g/p navigation box in my test folder, but it does not work for the 12-item f/g/p navigation box on my Featured Galleries page.
So it looks like my statement that there has been an update here may have been premature ... and that the weirdness of the current implementation is even weirder than I thought.
SmugMug, please fix this!
Sort by... oops, doesn't work!
borealphoto.smugmug.com
Former SmugMug Product Team
aaron AT aaronmphotography DOT com
Website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com
My SmugMug CSS Customizations website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com/Customizations
F,P,G block, add a folder and it appears on the site not where it is in the organiser view, but at an apparently random point.
Organiser view appears to work in that I can drop and drag folders and galleries all over the place, but folders do their own thing on the site.
This needs fixing now. Organise should organise and the layout should respect that. Not rocket science, is it?
So, I decide to use a smart gallery whilst I wait for a fix. I can select the items from the folder fine. Then I need to add the items from the galleries in the folder. The rules wizard offers me four hidden galleries that I don't want to display yet, but not the one publicly visible one that I do want to use. Seriously wondering why I pay for this piece of ****.
If it's sourced from a:
1) FOLDER, it should follow the organizer sorting method.
2) ITEMS I CHOOSE, it should follow some sorting selected by the user or perhaps by some options (alphabetical, by date, etc). There should be a way to reorganize, add, or delete items and still maintain a given order.
When sourced from a FOLDER, the FGP block displays content based upon what type of content it is: Folders first, Galleries second, and Pages last. It will follow the organizer position for each of those. So if you've selected "By Name" you'll get "Folder 1, Folder 2, Gallery 1, Gallery 2, Page 1, Page 2." If you manually sort it, you could get "Folder 2, Folder 1, Gallery 1, Gallery 2, Page 2, Page 1," ... etc.
How are you expecting it to behave for "Items I Choose"? Do you want to be able to mix Folders, Galleries and Pages or do you want it to display in the Folder, Galleries, Pages order?
Former SmugMug Product Team
aaron AT aaronmphotography DOT com
Website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com
My SmugMug CSS Customizations website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com/Customizations
able to manually move and delete items. Add new items (placed at end) and then manually
move to any position.
My Website index | My Blog
I want to make sure I'm understanding this correctly ... you want the ability to mix Folders, Galleries and Pages in whatever order of your choose?
i.e. this would work differently than how it works when the source is a folder, in which all Folders are displayed first, then all Galleries, then all pages?
Former SmugMug Product Team
aaron AT aaronmphotography DOT com
Website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com
My SmugMug CSS Customizations website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com/Customizations
I would very much like to be able to mix folders, galleries, and pages as I designate when working with the "Items I Choose" option.
An example application sits in my featured galleries page at http://jtringl.smugmug.com/Featured. That page uses a f/g/p widget. Right now, wherever I update this, I have to recreate it from scratch. The items there are more-or-less in chronological order and there is one folder that naturally fits in the middle.
If the f/g/p widget were more friendly, I might also break some of my larger galleries into several shorter ones. The 189-photo gallery at http://jtringl.smugmug.com/Browser/Farther-Afield/Wyoming-The-Winds--Cirque-of-the/ is a good example. That many photos at one bite is a lot, even for interested friends. That big gallery might very comfortably break into three smaller ones (maybe more). I've already got hyperlinks in the gallery description that point to where the beginning of each of the three would be. If I did that, the two places where I use a f/g/p widget to cite that gallery, the featured page linked above and the 2014 page at http://jtringl.smugmug.com/Browser/2014-Galleries, would want to reference the folder that holds the smaller galleries rather than the three smaller galleries themselves. And in both, the natural place would be somewhere in the middle of the the f/g/p list, not separated out.
And, just to bring this back to the issue I raised throughout this thread, doing all this really requires a convenient way to edit the selections. Right now you can edit the f/g/p widget selection via the selection box at the side, but doing so forces alphabetical order. Since I don't want things to be alphabetized, it's not a functional solution. I start from scratch each time. The behavior of the gallery widget provides an acceptable model although it's easy to imagine better approaches.
BTW, Aaron, let me note I'm delighted that you've joined the SmugMug team and are working through some of the interface issues. You were right on with your August 9 post over on the Dgrin Support Forum.
The sources could be from many different locations/folders.
One example I use it for is my bird galleries are by year, month and day. A trip might overlap a month so
I can combine that overlap on one page/folder. Much better then using a sharegroup as I have control
of customization.
My Website index | My Blog
Perfect. This is the feedback I'm looking for. The organizer always requires FOLDERS first, GALLERIES second, PAGES last, so when sourced by "Folder" and sorted by "Organizer" position it will always be FOLDERS, GALLERIES, PAGES. I've seen a lot of people mix these by using the "Items I Choose" method and I want to make sure we don't lose the functionality you guys so desperately want if we try to standardize.
I'm really glad to be here too. It's been a fun first few weeks and also a complete learning curve. As I learn the ropes I realize that a lot of things I thought were trivial fixes can be much more complicated ... like this issue. It will certainly be a fun challenge to balance the dgrin community requests with the desire for new features and other requests. Which brings me to ....
I think everyone will agree with you on this but (and here's probably the hardest part of my new job) I can't say if or when we can implement a better approach. In the mean time, I'm glad you found an option to work-around it.
Former SmugMug Product Team
aaron AT aaronmphotography DOT com
Website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com
My SmugMug CSS Customizations website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com/Customizations
This absolutely must work differently than it does when the source is a folder with all folders then all galleries, then all pages. That has never worked for me.
I want to be able to mix folders and galleries in the order of my choice.
For example, take a look at the Kaleidoscope page on my site. I use that to highlight my latest galleries or folders. Ideally I want the elements to show in newest to oldest order. As it exists right now, the first entry is a gallery, the second is a folder, and the third is a gallery. (If you check back in a couple of weeks I expect that I will have changed the entries on that page.)
Don't ask how I managed to get those page elements ordered - I had to select them several times to get the order I wanted.
Ideally I would like to be able to select the content elements in an order and I would also like to be able to manually reorder the elements. In many cases I am deselecting one entry and selecting a new entry.
--- Denise
Musings & ramblings at https://denisegoldberg.blogspot.com