[Neos] feedback of 1 day working with a content editor

[Dominic Garms]

Hello,

I would like to share my (frustrated) day with Neos. Beside the fact 
that for me as integrator / developer Neos feels very good in the 
beginning, content editors have very frustrating moments:

1. The backend is getting very slow, even with a 16mb internet line the 
backend is getting too slow to work with. After a while editing content 
the ajax spinners cycle that long, that a reload is necessary and very 
often the work is getting disturbed by a lot of random errors. The 
server is a managed server and has 8gb ram and lot of power, this should 
not be the issue.

2. The content structure area is too tiny, we tried to insert 17 topic 
panels and it was almost impossible to drag and drop anything inside. 
cut and paste seems to have some problems, we gave up on this one for 
now. The main problem is, that if I add a new element inside of a 
content collection, it is getting inserted as first one and not on the 
end of the collection. So it was hard to move it to the end of the 
collection, the "+" button on the very last content element was not 
working correctly or inserted into the wrong location and cut and paste 
was not working properly. And after the "+" selection of a content 
element, this new element must get preselected, otherwise the editor 
needs to search for it - with many content elements very time consuming.

3. Restriction for new content collections: it should be possible to 
configure NodeTypes ContentCollection, that only specific child elements 
are available. Often it happens that a content elements find its way to 
the wrong position in the context - a lot of errors pop up and an editor 
can't read them. The drag'n drop should not be possible and the "+" 
adding should only show the possible options for the current collection. 
This would serve a lot of time and makes content creation faster. Often 
only one type is possible, so the "+" button would add automatically 
this and the selection panel would be redundant.

4. There is a moment, that nothing works anymore in the backend. I 
changed some yaml configurations now the backend does not load some 
pages, the frontend only shows a more/less empty page:

Could not read page metadata from response. Please open the location 
http://spain-internships.com/information/frequently-askes-questions@user-admin 
outside the Neos backend

PHP Fatal error:  Call to a member function getContext() on a non-object 
in 
/Data/Temporary/Development/Cache/Code/Flow_Object_Classes/TYPO3_Neos_ViewHelpers_ContentElement_EditableViewHelper.php 
on line 72

I changed parts inside of the NodeTypes.yaml file, hoped that the 
changes are getting adjusted to all other elements. For example I 
removed a ContentCollection child of Page but still the element is 
visible. Is there something to reset to the actual yaml configuration? I 
tried flushing the cache but it doesn't work.

It reminds me on configuration errors inside of flexforms, but there was 
always a way to hide/delete content elements through ListView to check 
which content element is making the trouble. Now I don't see a way to 
solve it, deleting all content till it happens again? Then a continuous 
integration wouldn't be possible - if some adjustments can break the 
whole backend beeing visible.

Thats my thought, I wish you guys a nice evening,

Regards,
Dominic