Appreciate all the feedback.
metallissimus wrote:Let me start with what I liked:
Thanks! :clap:
metallissimus wrote:- Image focal point: Honestly that was the biggest surprise for me not being implemented already in an image centered CMS. The ability to set a focal point would hugely improve the usability of the cover mode for the intro slideshow and also the grid option for galleries and folders.
Noted. This is quite complicated. For the "intro", we are not resizing images or anything, but simply fitting an image into the slideshow area, depending on many factors (slideshow height, image aspect, screen aspect). I'm struggling to see how this can be done logically ... Even if you get a web designer (like me) to customize the focal point for a specific image with custom CSS, I am not sure how I would implement it technically to work nicely across all screen sizes and aspects. We could "nudge" the image in any direction (2D), but since the image only gets cropped either top/bottom or left/right (depending on device), the nudge direction would have to depend on the aspect. Also the amount of nudge could not be pixel based, but would have to be % based ... Else it would not move enough on large screens, and/or too much on small screens ... Remember the image scales to screen size.
As for thumbnails (resized images in gallery layouts), that is a different story. Traditionally, with many websites that have ONE thumbnail size/layout, one could often pick a focal point for the resized thumbnail. However, in X3, where an image might display at 200x100 in one location and 100x200 in another, and 100x100 in a third, I can't quite see how that would work. To be able to offer a user interface where you can select a "custom crop" for each image, would require specific dimensions for the resize. The only other option I can think of, is to use some automated face-recognition focal point processing (which is know is possible), but that would only work for photos with humans of course.
Lastly, I could make a point that you could always use non-cropped layouts (like justified or columns), although they may be less attractive for "folders" layouts, where you might want a "uniform" layout.
metallissimus wrote:- Responsive column count: I would love the ability to set different column counts for different screen sizes in a column layout like it is possible with grid.
I have to disagree a bit on this. You already have "column width" setting, which is responsive by nature. It will show the amount of columns that fit into the screen width, and will be progressive across all screen sizes (more than just three). May I ask, how would this improve your responsive layout in columns mode? I find it more satisfying in modern web design to have layout responsive naturally, instead of having to predefine based on a group of screen widths (which is not precise or 100% reliable). Anyway, noted!
metallissimus wrote:- Unsaved changes: Many times (especially in the beginning of working with X3) I accidentally discarded changes because I forgot to save them. Maybe a prompt like „There are unsaved changes, do you really want to leave?“ could be implemented, preferrably with an option to turn it off globally for those who don’t need/want it.
You mean for example when you try to close browser?
metallissimus wrote:- Markdown/Html: The ability to mix those would be great. Once you start using html you can no longer use markup inside the html-tags, which forces you to rewrite everything from markdown to html in some cases.
I get your point. Technically, markdown was never really made to be mixed with HTML (point of markdown is to avoid having to use <tags> in the first place), and therefore all markdown text editors are limited also. The idea is that once you start HTML, it means you will be using HTML (inside the block where you started the html) ... The editor then doesn't want to render markdown inside, in case it's not meant to be markdown. There is a workaround for this by using
markdown=1 inside the html tag where you want to continue using markdown. Example:
<div class="mystuff">
<div class="otherstuff" markdown=1>
## This will be a H2 header in markdown mode.
</div>
</div>
Unfortunately, I don't see it happening that you will get improved combined markdown+html editor options. The markdown editor is primarily a markdown editor, which also conveniently highlights HTML tags, which seems practical for X3 usage. We do want to offer a better wysiwyg HTML editor, for those users who are used to that (and don't know markdown).
metallissimus wrote:- Hidden pages/menu tree: The styling of the menu tree in the panel is a little confusing: Greyed out seems to mean hidden but actually doesn’t necessarily, also hiding a page from the menu doesn’t reflect in any way in the menu tree. Maybe some icons or additional styling (like line-through) could make it easier to understand and to discern different possibilities.
See response in
this post. Request noted ... There is always room for improvement, although it's not easy to squeeze all information about the page into the menu texts style.
metallissimus wrote:- SEO Title: I usually don’t want the site <title> to be the same as my <h1>. The workaround of hiding the title in the context and adding an <h1> manually in the content is quite tedious for bigger sites with lots of pages. I can imagine an option in the page settings like „append SEO Title to page title“ which gives you the ability to 1. set a title appendix globally (like your business name) and 2. don’t use that on every page if you (e.g. for SEO reasons) don’t want to.
I believe this will be available in next X3 release. I think it will be too complicated with „append SEO Title to page title“ ... Surely, if you want a separate SEO title vs page title, you could just write it? I think there will simply be a new optional input
"SEO Title" ... If set, it will be used for the page <title> meta tag (SEO). If not set, your page title will be used in the <title> tag (as it is now).
metallissimus wrote:- Style options: The ability to look at and modify all the default stylings via menu instead of custom CSS would likely appeal to many, especially not tech-savy users. (Of course that carries the risk of the users messing up the great default styling, but that’s their choice and responsibility.)
Definitely room for many improvements to X3 styles. I would like to note that "custom CSS" isn't specifically meant for overriding styles, but yes you could and would use it for that. Also, I would have to note that STYLES would always have to presented in "CSS" format, so user would still have to dare to see and do some basic edits of CSS. It's unreasonable to imagine that we can provide a user interface with input fields and checkboxes to style an X3 website, as CSS was invented specifically for this reason, and the X3 stylesheet is very complex.
As it is currently, all styles are packed into the single-file X3 CSS (which looks like
this). That CSS also contains structure and layout of course, mostly (99%) which should never be edited by user. How I see it, I would like to extract the skin/color specific CSS styles into a separate CSS file, and perhaps present this stylesheet to user for easier editing. Perhaps not easy to implement, and the problem of making websites too customizable for the user, is that it often affects the creators ability to style the website in terms of modern web design.
Thanks!