Editing & Page Creation
Redactor
This new text editor is cross browser compatible, makes clean HTML, is bootstrappy in its styling, and generally is totally awesome. Weve already integrated it with concrete5 so successfully that we can do text editing within the page instead of an overlay to our satisfaction.
This also works easily with the page in edit mode (skipping the click to put a specific block in edit mode), effectively giving us a middle edit state were going to use for other things later.
The only challenge were looking at here is what to do with legacy issues and TinyMCE. My own sense on this one is hey, you upgrade you lose old bad stuff and get sexy new stuff so if theres a strong argument for why concrete5 needs to support both editors, Id love to hear it.
As part of integrating redactor, weve been able to include a new snippits feature that amounts to Mail Merge in MSWord. You can pull in the current date, user name, page name, etc. Were architecting this in a flexible way so a developer might integrate with other data sources in handy ways.
Check out the video from a while ago...
Page Creation
Demoing editing a page on concrete5 always feels great, prospects just get it and quickly become clients. Demoing page creation is less awesome. Explaining to someone that your whole site is a tree and you have to goto the parent of where you want this page to be first is where they start to come back to earth and realize they need to pay attention. Composer starts to solve this problem a bit, but it also solves a completely different problem of making data entry screens for CRUD type problems. Adding more options rarely makes something less overwhelming. Were going to solve this problem by breaking it along more traditional lines:
1) What is composer today will mature into something that creates the scaffolding a developer needs to create a custom entry/edit UI in the dashboard. Use this for creating interfaces for inputting strongly typed content.
2) What is Add a Sub Page today will mature into something more geared for drafting as you go. You can add content from anywhere, you start writing (with auto-save) before you have to decide what it is youre making or where youre going to want to publish it. There will be mobile and browser toolbar versions of this Create tool.
New Add Block Interface
Adding a block will be as simple as dragging its icon from the Add Block toolbar into an area at the exact point you wish it to display.
Page Types
The fact that sometimes page types exist for layout and sometimes as an object model is not great. Someone should be able to add a calendar event or a blog post, and also switch its form factor. Were going to introduce a new concept called Feature that we can use to quickly determine if a page contains certain types of data for programmatic purposes. This should let us organically push page types towards the layout solution and de-couple functionality from requiring specific page types more. Blocks and add-ons could mark pages as implementing these Features, meaning that youll never have to choose whether a page is a Calendar Event or a Product Detail page type.
Layouts
Were currently rewriting Layouts completely. The next version of Layouts will honor permissions and permissions inheritance correctly, be better integrated nto the concrete5 editing system, work correctly with area-specific developer methods, integrate better with themes, and be a bit more aware of modern style guidelines. Yes you can lock layouts and reuse them today, but it feels like a last minute feature. We want to make it easier for you to create snap to points so a site owners layout falls on common alignment lines.
Image Editor
We currently have three image editing solutions in concrete5. The avatar picker, the image sizer from composer, and the edit image from file manager. Some of them are Flash (ick). All of them suck. Were rebuilding all of these to be served by one attractive well thought out extendable image editor that the community can add filters/plugins to.