Feedback and ideas from a new user
Posted: 29 Oct 2019, 05:27
I thought I’d write down some thoughts that occured to me while getting to know X3 and migrating my old website. As I said before I couldn’t be happier, but of course there’s always room for improvement.
Let me start with what I liked:
- Ease of use: Although there isn’t that much documentation it’s amazingly easy to set up a site, get it filled with content and running. The interface overall is pretty intuitive but nonetheless offers a lot of possibilities.
- Help in panel: The little ?-boxes are incredibly helpful and make for much of the above mentioned experience.
- Design: I am kind of a perfectionist when it comes to design and I have to say I am impressed with the look of an X3 page out of the box. It looks so good I try hard taming my urge to modify certain details because I’m afraid every modification might actually make it look worse.
- Support: Speed and helpfulnes of your answers in this forum is incredible.
What I missed (and hopefully not just overlooked) or didn’t like – I know some of this has already been brought up in the forums but I want to underline those points:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.)
- Saveable styles/themes: I would have liked an option to save a whole configuration to easily compare it to something completely differently styled. I think that would lead to some kind of switchable themes, which again I guess could also attract a lot of users and therefore make the whole X3 ecosystem grow.
I am not a developer so I can only guess how much work those features are, I assume some are rather trivial, others might be a real challenge…
Let me start with what I liked:
- Ease of use: Although there isn’t that much documentation it’s amazingly easy to set up a site, get it filled with content and running. The interface overall is pretty intuitive but nonetheless offers a lot of possibilities.
- Help in panel: The little ?-boxes are incredibly helpful and make for much of the above mentioned experience.
- Design: I am kind of a perfectionist when it comes to design and I have to say I am impressed with the look of an X3 page out of the box. It looks so good I try hard taming my urge to modify certain details because I’m afraid every modification might actually make it look worse.
- Support: Speed and helpfulnes of your answers in this forum is incredible.
What I missed (and hopefully not just overlooked) or didn’t like – I know some of this has already been brought up in the forums but I want to underline those points:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.)
- Saveable styles/themes: I would have liked an option to save a whole configuration to easily compare it to something completely differently styled. I think that would lead to some kind of switchable themes, which again I guess could also attract a lot of users and therefore make the whole X3 ecosystem grow.
I am not a developer so I can only guess how much work those features are, I assume some are rather trivial, others might be a real challenge…