Visual Page Editing conceptual overview
Concepts
Critique of the current design
The current design has reached its limits in a number of areas - a separate page describes these problems in more detail. But it has also set landmarks: the green edit bars act like markers for editable elements and they work very well on touch devices. The switch to turn off these bars provides a user with the perfect preview of the page with all its features fully working. In addition, the site can be browsed both in preview and editing mode, which makes it very intuitive to work on a number of pages or sections an editor may be responsible for.
The redesign of the current, preview-based editing into the Visual Page Editing of Magnolia 5 aims at providing a solution for all described problems while retaining all qualities of the existing implementation.
General layout
The standard interface of Visual Page Editing shows two main sections. Most of the screen is occupied by a preview of the page with the well-known green bars marking the editable paragraphs. A newly introduced toolbox on the right of the screen presents all actions and options applicable to the currently selected item or the page as a whole. The toolbox improves the overall visibility of actions and options by providing them with both a clear location on screen and enough space to present their interface. It introduces flexibility and scalability to support current and future modules wishing to add complementary functions to page editing.
The new visual page editing is still targeting mouse input, but has been crafted with touch devices in mind. While you can use this interface with a keyboard, Page Structure Editing has been specifically optimized for keyboard input and thus should be the preferred way to edit a page using keys only.
Area editing
Visual page editing in Magnolia 5 maintains the edit bar introduced in earlier versions. The edit bar clearly marks that a paragraph may be edited. Previous mockups only showed editing