The handling of inherited placeholders in edit mode

[David Bertrand]

https://github.com/divio/django-cms/issues/3647

Filed this issue a couple years ago and it keeps popping up from time to time, preventing me from being able to use inherit freely in projects.

The basic issue is, a decision was made years back (for very understandable reasons) to just not display inherited placeholders in edit mode. In my experience, that tends to cause a small amount of confusion for the editor, but it's made even more confusing if you happen to set up your placeholders like this:

{% placeholder "content" inherit or %}
{% static_placeholder "global content" %}
{% endplaceholder %}

The results in your child pages incorrectly displaying the static placeholder while in edit mode, but the inherited placeholder in live mode.

The one thought I had for a better UX, was to display the inherited placeholder as expected but return an error through the messaging system if the user attempts to edit it on the wrong page. Even more ideal might be to prevent even attempting to edit them on the wrong page, but not sure if a mechanism for disabling placeholders like that exists currently.

[Gregor Kopka]

I would like to chime on in this:

{% placeholder "foo" inherit %} is currently extremely confusing as visible content simply vanishes from the page when entering edit mode.

This is somewhat livable with in structure mode (a note that the placeholder inherits from the parent would be helpful though), but in content mode this just leads to calls from users asking to revert the mistake they just made (as it makes them think that they just deleted stuff by accident).

[Angelo Dini]

I agree, we should add an icon or indication that it is an inherited placeholder. 

there is also already a ticket to track it: https://github.com/divio/django-cms/issues/5037

Best

Angelo

[David Bertrand]

An icon in structure mode definitely sounds like a nice improvement. Would this involve not hiding inherited placeholders in content mode, though? Most of the issues I have come up are related to users not understanding why that content disappears on child pages.

Thanks
Dave