One issue that graphical user interfaces often suffer from is a lack of scalability. Whilst a GUI can make a single operation trivial - think renaming a file in Windows Explorer, for example - it can, at the same time, make a larger number of operations excruciatingly painful - say, renaming a thousand files using Windows Explorer.
At least in your file manager, you can perform more basic operations on a number of files: think deleting them, for example. Imagine if you were forced to delete files one-by-one, selecting each one individually, waiting for a small delay, then moving your mouse over a menu item, and selecting 'delete'. Also imagine that it's very easy to accidentally copy an entire set of files that then need to be deleted.
Yes, RedDot enables you to get into this situation very easily. Thousands of unwanted 'pages', thousands of individual operations to get rid of them. A more powerful command-line interface, or even a more sensible GUI, could prevent this situation from arising but, unfortunately, neither appears to be offered as part of the package. Oh well, I guess that's the price of keeping things 'simple'.
2 comments:
I completely agree! I have just been through a huge migration of a static site into RedDot, and it was painful to say the least. My favorite example of your gripe above is that there is no "replace" all function within the Text Editor - you have to replace each instance of a correction by clicking replace a million times. Five words that plague me: NO GLOBAL FIND AND REPLACE! After searching for some text, I have to click each page individually that comes up in the search results, then edit that page, then search again, then repeat - literally ad naseum.
Ya it's very pain full if you have a large project. The smart tree UI falls apart when you are trying to render a node with several hundred pages or say several hundred publication packages.
The saving grace is you can use RQL to write an interface for you.
In general the UI is bad for editing mass quantities of content at once.
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