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My current customer has just switched from Tridion 2009 to 2011. The content managers (who do nothing but Tridion all day) are a bit disappointed about a few things:

  • When they insert a component onto a page, they need to resize the columns (because the titles of the components are very long here). This setting is not remembered, they need to resize it everytime.

  • They cannot use the tab key to navigate between fields in a component.

  • When they click on the schema dropdown in the component edit screen to select a schema, they cannot use the keyboard to navigate to items (by pressing the first letter of a schema).

The content managers estimate that on the whole they spend about 75% more to create a page than on 2009.

Does this sound familiar to anyone here? If so, what do you recommend to mitigate these issues?

Also, would an upgrade to 2013 help them at all?

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  • Out of curiosity, 75% of what? Missing tab functionality is irritating (and trust me, I'm not downplaying the irritation factor!), but might cost you a second or two per component presentation. Presumably these are very complex pages. Oct 5, 2013 at 17:59
  • @DominicCronin These kind of customer reports are always hard to verify, they are often born out of a sentiment rather than scientific research. But having said that, the implementation here relies heavily on having many component presentations on a page. Every time they select a component to insert, they need to adjust the column widths, often more columns than one because you can only resize a column until it hits the next column. Also, they need to resize the tree view because the folder structure is rather deep.
    – Quirijn
    Oct 7, 2013 at 10:47

3 Answers 3

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The last 2 bullet points have definitely been addressed in 2013. You can tab properly (I remember issues with IE though, not sure if it's still an issue), and you can start typing a schema name to get it in the drop down (btw, that works also in CME list views, you can start typing to move to a component or page in the list). I don't think we fixed the remembering column width settings.

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  • Would it be possible to write a gui extension to remember the column widths and/or the width of the navigation tree?
    – Quirijn
    Oct 4, 2013 at 19:48
  • Everything is possible! :) I would propose asking that as a separate question, maybe some of the UI gurus will take it as a challenge.
    – Nuno Linhares
    Oct 4, 2013 at 20:58
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SDL Tridion 2013 fixes Schema navigation by letter presses. Navigating by the tab key seems to work for me as well, though I had issues with IE in compatibility mode.

2013 also adds a useful "clear field" option with an "x" in the right side. If possible, I'd have the authors test run 2013 to see the improvements.

I also noticed a "tall fields" issue in 2011, follow-up with Support on that one if it's an issue for the authors.

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I'm completely with you on this one. I too am an avid keyboard (shortcut combinations) user and indeed since new Anguila GUI in 2011, this aspect of usability has been lacking.

All I can think of is to open tickets on each individual matter and file Enhancement Requests, in the hope they will be addressed at some point in the future.

Upgrading to 2013 will not help, afaik.

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