End user friendly access to header and footer texts in views
Views 2 has undergone significant improvements to it's UI over Views 1. But even for moderately experienced Drupal users it can still be a bit overwhelming. When I need to show the edit views form to a customer who just wants to tweak the header or footer text on a view, that's just plain wrong. There are of course a couple of hacks to get around this:
- view + some form_alter magic: This is probably the most obvious solution. When your site admin clicks on the edit tab, everything but the header and footer text are hidden. This seems like a lot of trouble and things will get messy with the Views 2 UI.
- page + block view: If you only need a header text on the page where visitors will enter a view (e.g. your view doesn't contain more elements than what fits on 1 page) you could make a page with a block view in the content area. We have been using this solution a lot: end users don't need to understand the difference between a view and a page "page": they can click the edit tab and change the content.
- view + blocks: If you need both a header and a footer, or if you need the text to show on all pages of a view you could add a header and/or footer block. With the block editing menu system in the Zen theme your user can then again click the button to edit the text (If you don't know what I'm talking about, check out the Zen theme).
In your opinion should we have a separate permission setting for editing basic settings on a view? Or do you have a better solution?
Bookmark/Search this post with:
I assume you've found this which does exactly what you're looking for....
http://drupal.org/project/views_ui_basic
Yes that module now became the most elegant solution to the issue.
Thx for posting!
A view's header and footer must be editable, but no admin in their right mind would allow a client to face the views admin panel. (I barely trust myself in there).
I have tried all of the above suggestions, and while some of these workarounds are clever, they are all unintuitive, overly complicated hacks for something that should be dead simple to achieve.
The header and footer fields are already part of the view — as they should be. We just have to figure out a way to edit and submit these text areas independently of the views admin panel.
For example, how great would it be if the user click little inline [edit header] and [edit footer] that opened a modal popup containing a single text area for editing that one field (kind of like the panels module). Upon clicking submit, the page is refreshed and the user sees his changes made and he never even had to know the views admin panel exists.
Hey - we use the page + block view for lots of clients. It's the perfect solution for "we have a description and a list of things" conundrum that befalls... almost every web site...
I usually handle this by creating another content type using fields for the header, footer, and whatever else, and placing the view in the proper place with a view field. You can then control who can change what with field permissions.
What about not giving your client the possibility to screw up? You can split it down the middle, and make it another permission - but I doubt it will really be easier.