[MTOS-dev] Template Listing Screen

[Mark Carey]

On Thu, Apr 10, 2008 at 5:07 PM, Byrne Reese <byrne at sixapart.com> wrote:
>  Question #1 - does this make sense to everyone?

It makes sense to me as an advanced user (and it is nice to know that
there is indeed a indicator on the listing screen).  I do worry,
however, that this will confuse many users.

Before getting into semantics, perhaps we can reduce the number of
options.  It would be great if "Manual" and "Disabled" could be
merged, perhaps calling them both "Manual".  Of course, in  doing so,
I may be asking for a new feature: a way to manually rebuild maps that
are set to disabled (Arvind's suggested "select archive maps to
rebuild" feature, as descriebd earlier in this thread, would fit the
bill it seems, as long as it "forced" the rebuilding of disabled
maps).  I have came across several cases where I would have loved a
"manual only" option for rebuilding archives, so this would be a
*real* feature --- with added bonus of reducing our list here to 4
items.

As for the semantic issue, I hear Su's point about turning off
"rebuild with indexes" and then rebuilding them via cron on a
scheduled basis (a rebuild scheduling feature in the MT UI would be
great of course, but I don't think we are quite there yet...).  That
said, in such cases, I think "manual" is an accurate description,
since the only way to rebuild those *without using 3rd party
tools/plugins* is to do so manually.  And those experienced enough to
be setting up cron jobs won't be confused seeing "manual" -- but
clients might ("manual?!?  I need that template to be up to date!!")
;)

"Asynchronously" is going to be the confusing one, but that should
only show up for a small percentage of sites that use PQ, who should
be more technical/experienced, as long as the message that
"Asynchronously == Publishing Queue" is said loud and clear.

"Dynamically" makes sense, and current users will have seen this
language already.

My suggestion is that this column be hidden by default, only appearing
automagically once a non-standard publishing method is chosen for a
template.  That way the listing screen becomes even simpler for
beginners who keep the default template publishing settings for all
templates.

-Mark