Collections including related items: weird!

[Erik Rose]

I ran into a bug wherein Collections on my site would include their  
Related Items in their search results: http://dev.plone.org/plone/ticket/8325 
. Giving chase, I found this is apparently on purpose—http://dev.plone.org/collective/changeset/45217 
—though it's sure felt like a bug to me, my content providers, and all  
the developers I've talked to. What was the intended purpose of this  
behavior? I think changing it would be an improvement for most people,  
but if there's some popular use case I'm missing, I'd like to know it.

Best regards,
Erik Rose
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[Wichert Akkerman]

Erik Rose wrote:
> I ran into a bug wherein Collections on my site would include their
> Related Items in their search results:
> http://dev.plone.org/plone/ticket/8325. Giving chase, I found this is
> apparently on
> purpose—http://dev.plone.org/collective/changeset/45217—though it's
> sure felt like a bug to me, my content providers, and all the
> developers I've talked to. What was the intended purpose of this
> behavior? I think changing it would be an improvement for most people,
> but if there's some popular use case I'm missing, I'd like to know it.

This was an often requested feature: the ability to select a number of
content items that should always appear at the top of a collection. It
made sense to use the otherwise unused related items field to implement
this.

Wichert.

--
Wichert Akkerman<wichert@...>    It is simple to make things.
http://www.wiggy.net/                  It is hard to make things simple.



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[Erik Rose]

> This was an often requested feature: the ability to select a number  
> of content items that should always appear at the top of a  
> collection. It made sense to use the otherwise unused related items  
> field to implement this.

Thanks, Wichert. I can understand this being a useful feature. I think  
we can keep it and still do better, UI-wise, than special-casing the  
use of the Related Items field, as it confuses 8 out of 8 of the users  
I informally polled. Besides, the Related Items field is not otherwise  
useless on Collections; my content editor sought to use it for its  
normal purpose and considered the resulting behavior a bug, as did the  
other 7 polled.

What do you think of adding an actual, dedicated field to Collections,  
something like a ReferenceField called "Other items to include"? A  
migration could move any related-to-Collections items to this field.  
I'm happy to write a PLIP and the code and do some usability testing.

Regards,
Erik

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[Wichert Akkerman]

Erik Rose wrote:

>> This was an often requested feature: the ability to select a number
>> of content items that should always appear at the top of a
>> collection. It made sense to use the otherwise unused related items
>> field to implement this.
>
> Thanks, Wichert. I can understand this being a useful feature. I think
> we can keep it and still do better, UI-wise, than special-casing the
> use of the Related Items field, as it confuses 8 out of 8 of the users
> I informally polled. Besides, the Related Items field is not otherwise
> useless on Collections; my content editor sought to use it for its
> normal purpose and considered the resulting behavior a bug, as did the
> other 7 polled.
>
> What do you think of adding an actual, dedicated field to Collections,
> something like a ReferenceField called "Other items to include"? A
> migration could move any related-to-Collections items to this field.
> I'm happy to write a PLIP and the code and do some usability testing.

I just implemented it, I'll defer this to our UI people.

Wichert.

--
Wichert Akkerman<wichert@...>    It is simple to make things.
http://www.wiggy.net/                  It is hard to make things simple.


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[Erik Rose]

>> What do you think of adding an actual, dedicated field to  
>> Collections, something like a ReferenceField called "Other items to  
>> include"? A migration could move any related-to-Collections items  
>> to this field. I'm happy to write a PLIP and the code and do some  
>> usability testing.
>
> I just implemented it, I'll defer this to our UI people.

Wow, thanks! My content providers and I are thrilled. What do you  
think, UI people?

Erik

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[Erik Rose]

>> I just implemented it, I'll defer this to our UI people.
>
> Wow, thanks!

(Oops. It occurs to me that you probably meant "Don't blame me; I only  
implemented it.")

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[Wichert Akkerman]

Erik Rose wrote:
>>> I just implemented it, I'll defer this to our UI people.
>>
>> Wow, thanks!
>
> (Oops. It occurs to me that you probably meant "Don't blame me; I only
> implemented it.")

I did. Or to phrase it different: I personally have no interesting in
changing it, and changing it would mean a content migration on every
existing Plone site which makes it quite painful.

Wichert.

--
Wichert Akkerman <wichert@...>    It is simple to make things.
http://www.wiggy.net/                   It is hard to make things simple.


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[Martin Aspeli]

Wichert Akkerman wrote:

Erik Rose wrote:
>>> I just implemented it, I'll defer this to our UI people.
>>
>> Wow, thanks!
>
> (Oops. It occurs to me that you probably meant "Don't blame me; I only
> implemented it.")

I did. Or to phrase it different: I personally have no interesting in
changing it, and changing it would mean a content migration on every
existing Plone site which makes it quite painful.

Could we not just change the label from "related items" to "featured items" or some such?

I'm not sure collections by default need "related items" functionality that's analogous to how they work on pages etc. The whole point of collections is to find "related items" and show them. :-)

Martin

[Wichert Akkerman]

Previously Martin Aspeli wrote:

>
>
>
> Wichert Akkerman wrote:
> >
> > Erik Rose wrote:
> >>>> I just implemented it, I'll defer this to our UI people.
> >>>
> >>> Wow, thanks!
> >>
> >> (Oops. It occurs to me that you probably meant "Don't blame me; I only
> >> implemented it.")
> >
> > I did. Or to phrase it different: I personally have no interesting in
> > changing it, and changing it would mean a content migration on every
> > existing Plone site which makes it quite painful.
> >
> >
>
> Could we not just change the label from "related items" to "featured items"
> or some such?

There are things like like portlets which show related items to
consider. Those don't care about the label :)

Wichert.

--
Wichert Akkerman <wichert@...>    It is simple to make things.
http://www.wiggy.net/                   It is hard to make things simple.

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