Symphony.

Hi all,

I’m trying out Symphony CMS and I’ll be using it on a very small project first. As a user who’s not acustomed to the Symphony CMS admin UI yet, I found one thing puzzling: it’s sometimes hard to tell where the hell you are or what page/asset/etc. you’re configuring or editing.

It seems that:

1. You often end up with assets with similar or identical names. For instance you may have a Page, a Section and a Data Source named identically, or with similar (and easy to confuse) names.
2. The UI does not differentiate between asset types beyond the first level (Blueprints/System/Sections). Users have to rely on the name they picked for a given asset, and on the form elements shown in the page to know if they’re editing a Page, a Data Source, or something else.

As a “quick” fix, I would suggest changing the main title (H2) to a combined breadcrumbs/title UI element. Here’s a mockup:

Simple mockup comparing current Symphony CMS admin pages and the proposed change (PNG, 100KB)

What do you think?

Hello Florent and welcome to the Symphony forum!

I rarely run into this issue since, for me, the layout of the page itself makes it clear on what I'm dealing with (as you've mentioned also). Furthermore: there's no reason content ('assets') cannot be named identically.

Nonetheless I think adding a breadcrumb UI element is an improvement also because it allows for one click less to access a Publish page (e.g. straight to Sections instead of through the dropdown menu). Good thinking!

Welcome Florent!

The UX/UI Working Group is currently working on the user interface that will be updated in Symphony 2.3. A breadcrumb navigation that clarifies backend structure and user position is already in the works in that context.

I guess we'll have more detailed information about the upcoming UI improvements after the Symposium in Cologne.

It's a good suggestion, Florent. Some extensions already use this technique when they provide pages several levels deep, for example Search Index:

Re-using the H2 makes visual sense, although not semantically, since it dilutes the contents of the H2. As Nils says, an element of breadcrumb navigation is in the works, so this reinforces to us that this needs addressing. Thanks!

The biggest potential headache is in the publish screen, when you have linked sections. You can click the count of entries on the table, which navigates to the "child" section, filtered by that parent. (Imagine an Articles section, you click the number of Comments to view all comment entries for that one article). Logically the crumb would be:

Articles > [Article name] > Comments

As opposed to simply:

Comments

However Symphony doesn't know what a parent/child section is, so determining this relationship for a breadcrumb is tricky. But not insurmountable... we just haven't thought about it enough.

nickdunn,

However Symphony doesn't know what a parent/child section is, so determining this relationship for a breadcrumb is tricky. But not insurmountable... we just haven't thought about it enough.

Symphony has sym_sections_association table in database, so it may know about parent-child connections (at least when they are defined through SelectBox Link Field or SubsectionManager Field). But there might be more than one parent, which could be a problem, because Symphony will not know which parent to link to when generating [Article name] part from your example :).

Yes sorry, that was my point, but poorly articulated.

As far as I know this is why breadcrumbs have never been added, because they need to work in all cases.

Maybe there could be a way for administrator to point to "default" parent? Or maybe instead of simple, single link, there could be a submenu-like thing, with all available parents?