Story
I can add a page easily by selecting an existing page anywhere in a view, then choose to add a page. I first select a page template, then fill in the initial values. Most fields will have sensitive default values and it's clear to me, what I have to look at when I intend to add a typical page, and which fields I only have to touch, if I have to do something special right from the start. The important fields are visible right away.
Description of desired behavior
Adding a new page
Critique of the current way to add a page
In previous versions of Magnolia, you could create a new page right away. The newly created page would use a (configurable) default template. While it seemed like this was a quick way to add a page, you actually always had to change both URI and title, since nobody could live with the defaults. The default template chosen for the new page could have been the one you wanted, but the more templates a setup offered and the more generic a parent page was (e.g. a "section" page vs. a "site map"), the more likely you'd have to also change the template, since the one chosen for you wasn't the one you intended to use. Last but by far not least, there was no way for template authors to require a user to provide values for mandatory fields. This required templates to be constructed in a way that they could always be instantiated as pages, even with somewhat useless default values. And you'd had to know that you then had to go to the page properties to set some of the more sensitive values required for your page to work properly.
New way to add a page
Adding a page is now a three step process. You first select the page template, then provide meaningful initial values for all mandatory fields and possibly change some other fields as well. When you're happy with your choices, you finally go ahead and create the page - only then will it get added to your site.
Selecting a page template
This is described in Selecting a page template as it has a number of different aspects, which have to be separately covered.