v2 Pages page is great - Spark Update 3

Thanks Jack.   The team has been working so hard on the new component set.  It just was crying for us to put to use in our own product!  We took some risks with the layout and with the functionality,  but I’m glad you find them easy to work with.  Also glad you found the direct XML editor link.   That was a Friday afternoon easter egg… 

Cuz its a Skuid page - you all know how easy it is to update.  So send along any product improvement ideas and we’ll work to get them in place.  It will be getting better (while hopefully avoiding the experience rot of trying to put in all the features)

Ok, so after a week of using the new Pages page, I have some gripes:

Creating page packs is harder

• you used to be able to search for existing page packs, now it’s endless scrolling
• there’s an error creating new page packs, you can only do one, then you have to refresh the page (seems like someone forgot to Remove All Rows before Creating a New Row, so there’s multiple rows of the “new page pack” model at once, leading to an error that you can’t have multiple page packs with the same name)

You can’t sort the page by Module like you used to be able to do, you can only sort by name and last updated. 

Last Updated is less precise now - “3 days ago” doesn’t help if I want to know was it at 9am or 4pm 3 days ago.

Thanks for the feedback Jack.  Improving page packs mechanism (filtering, searching) are all in the works. Should be in our next release.    

We’ll look at the sort by Module - that’s a good suggestion. 

Last updated:  The balance between precision and ease of use is always a challenge.  We moved toward a more conversational UI,  I’ll take your feeback as a vote against that move… Stay tuned. 
 

Generally I like the sentiment of a more conversational tone, we’re always trying to think that way as well, and yeah I know it’s hard to keep the precision when you move that way. Would it be possible to include some more columns that are hidden by default? Like an exact CreatedDate, CreatedBy, LastModifiedDate, LastModifiedBy, all sortable…so for us nerdy users we could have that precision?

Although we’re moving towards the skuid CLI so that’s probably the better nerd option for manipulating pages, especially as far as page packs go. 

@Jack - wanted to get your feedback on sorting by Module.  As you know the “Module” field is a pick-list. Pick-lists have this strange feature that means they sort by the specified pick-list order rather than by Alpha.  It gets me every time.  Also using a table filter or filter action it is not possible to specify “Nulls_Last”    Would those two factors provide such a wierd experience that it would be better off not offered?  Or would you be comfortable with the weirdness.  

And BTW - we recongnize that the creation flow for new module values is already painful (having to go to the SFDC Object admin pages and add new picklist values) 

Hi Rob, talking about this with my dev team, here’s our feedback

• sorting by module is not important on the main page, more has to do with creating page packs, we understand that process is being worked on, the weirdness of a sort by module not being alphabetical is okay, just want to group recent changes by module

• order by options - would be great if include Name Z-A and Oldest Updated (basically descending versions of the two options already there)
• search in table - obvious that it’s including the module names in the search in addition to page names, but also seems to be including some other fields - what other fields? would be ideal to just search page name, because you can use filter by module
• Module filter - would be nice to include a “No Module” option like the v1 version had

Thanks Jack.  Those are all really good ideas.  Consider them in the backlog.