Goal
The form concepts for Magnolia 5 have been crafted with the goal to provide good structured, quick to grasp, easy to use forms. A number of grouping elements allow to divide even complex forms into individual elements and place these at clearly defined positions.
But this requires to manually work on forms. What about generic forms not using any grouping elements? What about set ups originally created for Magnolia 4? What will they look like when updated to M5?
Research
This section contains a number of 1:1 transitions from old forms to new forms. The old form is shown on the right, the new form on the left.
The new forms:
- are not recreated using any of the new grouping elements we have in M5
- may use fields, which work and look slightly different. These changes are completely transparent to the form definition.
- may rely on higher-level form infrastructure code, which e.g. provides a preview of a particular item type. Again, such changes should be transparent to the form.
Edit document properties
Here's an example of the dialog shown, if the user selects an item in the "Documents" workspace and opens its properties.
A couple of remarks on these mockups:
- Since we can't figure out the important values of a sub form automatically, the vertical tabs can't show any value lines. Instead, it shall center and enlarge the tab title.
- Some of the fields look and work slightly differently.
- The preview underneath the tabs could be triggered by code detecting the type of document when opening the properties dialog.
- The field descriptions are actually not existing. Since they are entirely optional, they could also simply not show.
- The contextual help page would have to be written, since it is defined as mandatory. Clicking the help button should not open a generic help page, but such a page probably has to exist in order to support old forms.
