Good Potential, But….

I am managing a site with c.1,000 WP Pages of content and so a hierarchical content tree is essential to manage things.

I have tried about 8 Tree/PageOrder Plugins and they all fall short; this is the most promising of all of them and I consider that it has some potential.

This feedback is based on using the Plugin on a large site and I hope it will be helpful for the developer and those considering this kind of tool.

I’ve given this Plugin a fairly low rating because I think it has some issues which make it unusable (as you’ll see from my notes, I have reverted to manual page ordering). Perhaps people using fewer pages do not have these issues, but when you have a lot of pages to manage, as I do, this is the Plugin behaviour you see:

DRAG&DROP: All of the Tree/Order plugins fail to work very well on the D&D aspect. They fail to pick up the file, or drop the file somewhere unintended (and often when I used it, under another page, thus creating a new child page) when I have not released the mouse button. Another behavior is that when the file is selected and shows it’s able to be moved, the “shadow file” (in CMS Tree Page View case, the line with the arrow/diamond) appears as if to place the file between two others, but on mouse-button release it doesn’t. It’s a lottery: sometimes it works, most of the time it doesn’t. I have tried FF, Chrome and IE — same behavior. CMS Tree is very hit-and-miss on D&D and, additionally, the software OPENS (EDIT) the file with a single click, even when I hover over the page icon (showing a cross, not selector hand on the page name)—so often not only can the file not selected to be moved, just trying to “select” the file to be moved opens the page in the WP editor. It would be helpful if the developer programed it so that clicking on the file ICON did not open the page editor.

FLYOUT WITH FILE INFO: CMS Tree Page View produces a “pop-up/flyout” white label containing some useful links and file information when you hover over a page in the list. The issue is that once the flyout has appeared, it never leaves (there is no “close” option) and I’ve found that when I am browsing down the list of files, and I pause over a page name, the flyout appears, obstructing the view – and access to — surrounding page names. As it cannot be closed, the only way to allay this issue is to hover on a page name further up the screen so it appears “up there” and doesn’t obstruct the view you are looking at. The feature should be re-thought. It would be useful to be able to send a file to the trash from the list, as well as see the current page order number at-a-glance (it does show the page ID which is useful).

PAGE NUMBERING (ORDER): CMS Tree Page View did all kinds of weird things with the page numbering. I would have expected, for example, having moved a page to the top of the list (just beneath its parent) that that page would have been given number 1 (or 0 perhaps). And the one below that, +1, etc. I had 25 files to re-order under a parent page (which itself was a child of root page) and when I gave up with the Drag & Drop and went back to manually re-ordering page-by-page, I saw that the CMS tree had given random numbers to the files: e.g. the first in the list was #6, the second was #8, the third was #9, etc.

I always donate to Plugins I try out and decide to keep for productive use; if someone can come up with a Tree Plugin that really works then I would donate and even be willing to buy such a Plugin.