Let's see if I can wrap this up a little. I have done some work on the entry editor/categories/tags over the past couple of days, but not all of them are committed/published via Spartacus (yet).
Dirks initial concerns:
Lux wrote:1. set as draft (oh, in 2.0 I have to scroll and click metadata to set it to draft mode)
2. set category (new overlay appears, I have to scroll to see all categories)
3. set tags (same as category)
4. set publishing date in the future (same as draft), no calendar overlay ...
1. The entry editor now has an additional button in the entry editor toolbar for that
2. With a lot of categories, you'll have to scroll either way. I guess you would have to scroll (in the expanded select box) in a 1.x backend as well.
3. Since you're opposed to clicking and scrolling, I don't see why you would even use the clickable tag list and not the autocompletion in the input field. (You can disable the tag list in the Freetag plugin options.) That being said, I still don't have a good solution for that. Not sure there is one.
4. As stated before, the missing calendar overlay is because your browser (I'm guessing Firefox) doesn't support the new datetime-local input field yet. We opted to not polyfill that because of the overhead.
As of now, the best solution for you I can think of would be to disable overlays in the backend (which currently is only possible as a global option, see below). I guess that kind of depends on what you're most opposed to – clicking or scrolling.
(Dirk, if you would like access to a dev blog where you can test this, ping me via email or something.)
Please note that this is by no means my “final take” on the entry editor. Still working on it. It's hard.
Lux wrote:for every action I have to switch between keyboard and mouse and I have to use both input methods to do it somewhat efficient
I guess that just comes with the territory in a web interface. I realize this is not neceessarily a great interface for keyboard-only use due to its complexity, but I'm not sure what we could do to improve that. Yes, we could add keyboard shortcuts – still an option, but a pain in the butt to implement. Which shortcuts do we use that are not used by the various browsers, how do we communicate that keyboard shortcuts even exists and what they are?
garvinhicking wrote:maybe it's better to have the list of available tags below the input area instead of above it
Implemented (that's one of the things not committed yet), including moving the “Done” button to the top right corner of the overlay. Might look a litte funny if you use a recent git checkout of the 2.0 core with a non-update freetags plugin.
garvinhicking wrote:On the other hand, we'd always have the option to create a new config option in the plugin to indicate [x] use inline display for freetags?
See above: I think we might need that, even for more things. I don't think the global “Use modal overlay or popups” option is granular enough at this point.
I also still think that both categories and tags could benefit from at least an option to display only the most used items, but I don't think that's going to make it into the RC, maybe not even the stable 2.0. It's just too much to think about and evaluate, and we want to get 2.0 released as soon as possible.
Also, the clickable tag list still needs a little more styling. As of now, it is very cluttered and hard to scan, making the whole overlay hard to scan. Haven't gotten around to that yet since I still need to understand how to emit version-specific CSS for plugins.
TL;DR: still working on it, still welcoming any input.
YL