[TYPO3-core] RFC: #7573: Page properties: Make author and author_email visible instantly

[Uschi Renziehausen]

Hello Dmitry,

> 
> I am not sure if Uschi uses BE daily herself. But I do. And my editors 
> do. And none of us likes new BE. More on this below.
> 

Yes, I do use the BE every day as an author, and I will do so in an 
evironment where the author field will be *required*. Reading what you 
have written here I made a simple test yesterday night with 2 people in 
my flat. I removed the patch Steffen, created a new page for them and 
asked them to fill in the title and the metadata including the author.

They both are aware of the fact that there are such things as meta data 
for description, keywords, author and so on, but they have absolutely no 
experience with t3. So they found the tab for metadata immediately, but 
not the one for author. That might change when the new icon for 
expanding secondary options is available.

They also asked what the abstract field is for. Mind you, we have two 
fields descriptive fields, which might come in handy in case the text 
that should be visible in search engine results and the one you *might* 
need for an overview of pages should differ. In any other situation one 
of them is superfluous and might be even confusing.

Thus, making author and author_email secondary options of abstract 
makes no sense in my eyes, especially not if you take into account that 
it is impossible up to now to have secondary options expanded by default 
unless you fiddle around with $TCA, and this means a real hurdle for 
typo3 newbie admins.

>> And if she asks for this eg which is really needed in praxis i believe 
>> it, because the editors should feel comfortable.
> 
> They don't.
> 
At least here is one user who is a lot more comfortable with those tabs 
than with scrolling upwards and downwards endless forms and at times 
even using the browser's search option to jump to the right field.

> Jens is not just for styling or making icons. He should be asked how BE 
> should look like! Not icons but whole BE! He *is* the guy who knows how 
> it must be! Good programmer is not the same as good HCI specialist. 
> Every big successful company or porject has HCI specialist who defines 
> how system should look like. This is not programmer's decision but HCI 
> specialist decision! In TYPO3 4.2 it went to hands of programmers again, 
> which is wrong!
> 
Hm, i am not exactly what you would call a coder, I do 'speak' some PHP, 
but my latin is better ;-)

> I rather think I drop templavoila and realurl and start my own BE 
> project. May be I should have done that instead of comments, ratings, 
> and supporting templavoila/realurl/tt_news.
Nooooooooooo! Thanks for your work in those areas!

> I think current steps are go to the wring direction. They do not make BE 
> cleaner, they make it more difficult. People have to spend more time 
> with new BE than with old BE to perform their work. BE is not intuitive 
> as it was hoped.
>

I agree that there is still room for improvement (e.g. those image 
fields look crowded), but I definitely do not think that people will 
have to spend more time, on contrary, the need less time, because 
clicking a TAB is much quicker then scrolling upwards and downwards all 
the time.

> Yes. that's right. About feedback. I kept my feeling quiet because I 
> thought they are only mine. But today I got fifth negatve feedback from 
> fifth editor. This is 100% negative feedback from people who have to 
> work with TYPO3 every day. This is a lot for me to start worrying.
> 
This means you have only asked people who have been used to the old BE. 
I think it is only human that people complain about changes *at first*. 
Have you asked them after they have worked with new BE for a week? I 
remember quite well that I was searching for those clear cache buttons 
and sweared a bit. But after having found the new position for the first 
time, I scrolled down in the left frame again a few times and then it 
came into my mind: You do not have to do this nasty scrolling down for 
that, it is  always at hand now, and I liked that feeling.

Regards, Uschi