Symphony.

After changing a section the normal behaviour of Symphony 2 is to show the detail information of the section again. Sometimes I like this feature, sometimes I hate it.

Would it be possible to provide both possibilities, to return to the section list or to return to the detail view again? I'm not sure if this could be done but maybe pressing crtl and clicking save could redirect to the list view while a simple click redirects to the detail view (as it does now).

I really don't know what to do about this. One of the things we've been thinking is to have "stay on edit page" as the default (or only?) option for saving blueprinty-things and "show me this entry highlighted in the list" as the default for saving entries. But even this is inadequate, because you usually don't want to continue editing things like data sources or sections, but you usually do want to continue editing or proof-reading text-heavy entries. How do we make it intuitive and efficient in both cases?

A good UI does not require the user to plan ahead. The way S1.x worked was by keeping you on the edit page unless you clicked the save button without holding SHIFT (so to return to the list page, you just needed to click the save button; all other ways of submitting the form, such as using the "s" accesskey, kept you on the edit page). I dislike this because it effectively makes the default the least often used behaviour, and forces you to think about which method to save with.

It should not be confusing to new users. If the user is unaware that pressing return and clicking yield different results (or worse, the behaviour is context-sensitive depending on whether you're editing blueprints or content), they be forced into conducting detective work to figure out the cause of this inconsistent behaviour, or else just conclude that Symphony is temperamental.

The way to solve these is to make all processes atomic (or single-purpose-only). The save button only saves, not also optionally redirects. If viewing the related list page is a common enough requirement, there should also be a link to the edit page for this single purpose. There are other alternatives like adding other button for "save and go back", but I don't like that so much. I'd be very interested to hear if anyone has other ideas for this.

The benefits of actually having more than one button are:

1) you don't leave it to the user to figure out some sort of implicit behavior, you make it explicit; 2) you don't add any extra steps to the process (specifying some sort of option, etc);

I don't LOVE the idea of having two buttons, but where I've used it (Wordpress's "Save and Stay"), it's done its job.

Another option along the same lines would be to add a checkbox to the effect of "Continue Editing." Such a checkbox would be off by default, but if the user had already chosen to continue editing and was still on the same page, it would remain checked.

The benefit of this in comparison to having two buttons is that, normally, you expect someone to save many times if they want to stay on the same page; you predict the correct "default" action for them in a greater number of cases.

Sfiera, that's a good idea.