File Panel
2018-03-09
Lots of people seem to get delighted about the simplicity of using Boomla, but those who just land on the site and quickly try to use it, are mostly frustrated. It’s because they have no idea how to use it.
We expect software to be intuitive. We would define intuitiveness as something that makes sense. That’s a very theoretical definition, because in reality, something is intuitive if it works just like the things we have used before.
And so random users who sign up, give it few minutes, then give up and leave. I wrote text based tutorials but nobody read it. I recorded video tutorials but nobody watched it.
The File Panel is my new attempt at making Boomla intuitive, by showing the file structure.
See the structure
The File Panel will show up on the left of your page. It will show your entire filesystem. You will find all your pages and your contents in there.
Above, you can see the pages.
And here, the contents.
When you hover your mouse over a file in the File Panel, it will be highlighted on the page. (Works for both pages and contents.)
When you hover your mouse over a file on the web page, it will be highlighted on the File Panel.
Notice that this only works when Structure view is enabled, which is highlighted with blue arrow on the image.
The eye icon allows you to hide/show hidden and system files. By default those are hidden (the eye is closed).
Finally let’s look at a deeper subpage of this website. You can switch between seeing the structure of the current page only (left), or that of the entire filesystem (right).
This is useful to get rid of the unneeded stuff.
Other features
Drag-and-drop works on the File Panel too, and of course you can drag between the page and the File Panel.
The contextmenu will open when you right-click files in the File Panel.
Upload works as expected, by dropping files on the File Panel just like over the user content area.
The numbers on the left of files are the buckets. (Files as folders are subdivided into buckets.)
And of course, you can hide the File Panel if you want.
Closing thoughts
I’d love you to try it and give me feedback either via email or via the Boomla Reddit channel.
This has been in the works for several months, as the entire frontend had to be rewritten from scratch to arrive at this. A little win to celebrate! :) But of course, we are just getting started with powering up the frontend.