Inline editing in the admin

[Michael Heilemann]

Currently, you can't edit comments in the admin. In fact, no interface for doing it even exists.

But I was thinking, why don't we simply forego the traditional 'editing page', and simply handle all editing of comments inline, on the manage page itself? This would provide the obvious advantage of not having to go to another page, but handle everything via ajax, which in turn means you can cycle through more comments faster. But also, it's one less page in the admin to worry about.

I would of course suggest that we also provide inline editing on all other manage pages, though with the added minor concern that there might be some confusion there on the users side as to what the differences are between editing inline and editing on the create page. But then it works fine for flickr, so why wouldn't it work for us?

If we do this, then we should keep in mind that it would be fortuitous to keep the code available to themes as well, so that the same inline editing can be done directly on the blog, without having to write new code.

Once again, I know nothing of db stuff, but I'll gladly design whatever UI is needed and guide the UX on it.

--
Michael Heilemann
http://binarybonsai.com

[Caius Durling]

+1 for the idea as long as it degrades for people accessing admin
through phones/browsers without javascript. Unless we decided at some
point to require javascript for the admin and go the plugin route for
phones/et all using the admin interface. Last I saw anything about
requiring javascript for the admin with no fallback, skippy was
talking about having a fallback due to his usage of the phone to admin
his blog(s).

C

[Michael Heilemann]

On Sun, Jun 1, 2008 at 1:56 PM, Caius Durling <nemo...@gmail.com> wrote:

+1 for the idea as long as it degrades for people accessing admin
through phones/browsers without javascript. Unless we decided at some
point to require javascript for the admin and go the plugin route for
phones/et all using the admin interface. Last I saw anything about
requiring javascript for the admin with no fallback, skippy was
talking about having a fallback due to his usage of the phone to admin
his blog(s).

I don't think the admin as a whole works without JS at the moment. The main menu alone is JS-based. But IIRC it was always, and remains, the intention to create a solid phone-based admin 'theme', but I don't think the main admin should be 'held back' to accommodate phones. However, once Monolith is 'done', a phone-based interface is definitely in the cards.

[Christopher Davis]

There was previously an interface for editing comments, and it was on the manage screen. I should know I wrote it :) It worked with a hidden text area/text field combination. When you clicked on edit it would display the text field below the comment, so you could edit it. 

It was lost in the orgy that was the monolith move. The code is still in SVN, although I won't guarantee that it will work with the current code base.

Chris

[Michael Heilemann]

On Sun, Jun 1, 2008 at 3:54 PM, Christopher Davis <c...@chrisjdavis.org> wrote:

There was previously an interface for editing comments, and it was on the manage screen. I should know I wrote it :) It worked with a hidden text area/text field combination. When you clicked on edit it would display the text field below the comment, so you could edit it. 

So it was sort of inline, but with a page-reload?

[Christopher Davis]

The save required a page reload, but not the display of the content for editing.

[Arthus Erea]

On Jun 1, 4:19 am, "Michael Heilemann" <heilem...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I would of course suggest that we also provide inline editing on all other
> manage pages, though with the added minor concern that there might be some
> confusion there on the users side as to what the differences are between
> editing inline and editing on the create page. But then it works fine for
> flickr, so why wouldn't it work for us?

Because Flickr is generally bite-sized content pieces, not 500 word
articles.

I think it is fine for inline editing in comments, where the content
is small and efficiency is important. However, for posts when I click
edit or want to change something, I expect to be taken to a full-blown
page where I can embed images, change tags, and most importantly
manage huge amounts of content. Implementing edit-in-place for posts
would be a major error, in my opinion, since the typical blog post
simply isn't the ideal format for quick editing.

[Michael Heilemann]

On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 00:37, Arthus Erea <arthu...@gmail.com> wrote:

 

I think it is fine for inline editing in comments, where the content

is small and efficiency is important. However, for posts when I click
edit or want to change something, I expect to be taken to a full-blown
page where I can embed images, change tags, and most importantly
manage huge amounts of content. Implementing edit-in-place for posts
would be a major error, in my opinion, since the typical blog post
simply isn't the ideal format for quick editing.

A couple of things to consider:

The 'typical blog post' is a myth. Everybody writes differently. For my 'clippings' posts, the text rarely exceeds a paragraph, much like Kottke or Gruber or a lot of other bloggers. The UI scales fine, don't worry about that.

And inline editing isn't meant as a substitude. But if you're running through your old entries, tagging or re-tagging, or simply changing headlines, you will learn to love it :)

I had a plugin for WordPress to do this on BB at one time, and it's a really nice way to work, as you can now correct spelling errors without moving into a major admin environment.

[Arthus Erea]

On Jun 12, 2:07 am, "Michael Heilemann" <heilem...@gmail.com> wrote:
> And inline editing isn't meant as a substitude. But if you're running
> through your old entries, tagging or re-tagging, or simply changing
> headlines, you will learn to love it :)
>
> I had a plugin for WordPress to do this on BB at one time, and it's a really
> nice way to work, as you can now correct spelling errors without moving into
> a major admin environment.

I think perhaps I was unclear of what you meant. Did you mean that for
the headings, tags, meta information we would have inline-editing? If
so, I fully support that and think it would work very will.

However, I think clicking the "edit" button on right should *always*
take you to the full-on post publish page.

[Michael Heilemann]

Yes, the 'edit' button is full-on edit.

[Arthus Erea]

In-line editing for comments has been committed in revision 2054.
(http://trac.habariproject.org/habari/changeset/2054)

Presently, the editing is enabled when an the comment content is
clicked. All visible fields (email/url/content/etc.) can be edited
inline. The dropbutton is converted into the editor controls. (Update/
Cancel).

The edit link the dropbutton still doesn't link to anything. I think
we need to decide whether we do want to develop a full comment
interface and have it link to that (harder, but good failback) or just
have it activate inline editing (trivially easy).

For the record, I would prefer having a full comment (page-load)
interface. I'd be happy to develop this, or build a backend for
anything Heilemann puts together.

[Geoffrey Sneddon]

I, for one, want a separate page. The longer content gets, the less I
want to edit it inline. One thing we must certainly not do is when
bulk moderating comments (say, deleting them) have to send the content
of every single comment when doing so: that made the old admin almost
unusable on a slow connection.

--
Geoffrey Sneddon
<http://gsnedders.com/>

[Owen Winkler]

Geoffrey Sneddon wrote:
>
> On 1 Jun 2008, at 09:19, Michael Heilemann wrote:
>
>> Currently, you can't edit comments in the admin. In fact, no
>> interface for
>> doing it even exists.

> I, for one, want a separate page. The longer content gets, the less I

> want to edit it inline. One thing we must certainly not do is when
> bulk moderating comments (say, deleting them) have to send the content
> of every single comment when doing so: that made the old admin almost
> unusable on a slow connection.

I agree. I like the inline editing feature for quick edits, but there
are a few things that are missing from the interface that I think are
essential.

Primarily, I sometimes need to know the IP address of the commenter.
This is essential for finding those threads of comments where the same
guy posts as 5 different people having a conversation among himselves.

There is no place in the admin that displays the reason why comments are
moderated or marked as spam. The core spamchecker plugin supplies these
reasons as commentinfo. I don't see a reason to necessarily display
this data in the comment listing, but I occasionally get curious why
specific comments get tagged as spam/moderated, and have to pull open
the database to find out why. (The same thing can be said for the
detailed information stored with individual event log entries!)

Additionally, we don't have anywhere to display commentinfo generally if
a plugin wants to provide that output.

Has anyone noticed that the edit link in the dropbutton doesn't do anything?

[Arthus Erea]

Yes, I too agree.

It was always the plan to have a full edit interface (on a separate
page).

Ideally, it should also include commentinfo (and IP address, etc.). If
nobody else wants to tackle this, I'd be willing to.

[Michael C. Harris]

On Thu, Jul 24, 2008 at 09:59:29AM -0400, Owen Winkler wrote:
>
> > On 1 Jun 2008, at 09:19, Michael Heilemann wrote:
> >
> >> Currently, you can't edit comments in the admin. In fact, no
> >> interface for doing it even exists.

[snip intervening discussion]

> Has anyone noticed that the edit link in the dropbutton doesn't do anything?

#359

--
Michael C. Harris, School of CS&IT, RMIT University
http://twofishcreative.com/michael/blog
IRC: michaeltwofish #habari