What is the current road map on providing Page Auto List widgets with the ability to filter lists by tags (or categories)?
Hi Dan,
I don’t believe anything like this is currently on the road map, but if you would like, I can convert this topic into an Idea topic type so the feature request will be visible to our Product Management team.
I do think it would be a very useful addition to the widget. I know of one other customer who actually leverages our DTS API to automatically post a query to a Results widget filtering by categories, which is essentially mimicking what a Page Auto-List filtering by categories would look like.
Being able to filter page content by tag into specific auto lists would revolutionize the manner in which pages could aggregate info for site visitors.
So yes, this would be great to see as part of the auto page lists.
Great, I agree. I have changed this topic into an Idea.
While you Percussion folks work on making the page auto list more flexible, I’d also like to request that in addition to filtering by tag, that a page auto list could also filter by location of the widget relative to the page it lives on.
I have a number of major company landing pages that all use the same template. Because they all use the same template, I can’t really format up a page auto list to show content specific to that landing page from the Design mode. Instead, it has to be done from the Editor mode on every page that has that auto-list widget.
For example, I might have a template called “Landing Page” that is used by Vertical 1, Vertical 2, Vertical 3, Services division 1, Services division 2, Services division 3, and so on.
On each of these landing pages, I’d like to have a page auto-list that displays all the pages for a specific vertical or service division.
So let’s say that Vertical 1 has 20 pages in it’s Finder folder (these are not sections but simple content pages). I want the auto list to show on the “Landing Page” template, as well as the simple content page template for a total of 2 templates covering 21 pages for just this one Vertical. Currently I need to go to each of these pages in the Editor mode and configure the page auto-list widget to show only pages that are in the Vertical 1 folder.
Then I go to each of the other verticals and services pages and do the same thing; configure the page auto-list widget for their specific division or vertical.
Instead of having to go through hundreds of pages to configure this widget (or alternatively build duplicate templates for each vertical or division), what would be great is if I could configure, from the Design mode, the page auto-list to “Display only pages that are in the same folder as the current page” or something like that.
In other words, rather than displaying a list of pages with an absolute reference, they could be relative to the location of the widget.
Make sense?
Dan, it sounds like you’re looking for the auto-list to behave similar to the Navigation widget in that its content can be configured on the template level so that it’s relative to the section that its page lives on. Is this accurate? If so, can I assume that the inability of the Navigation widget to display non-section landing pages and filter by template makes it unsuitable for what you’re trying to do here? I do see how what you’re describing could be very useful in terms of streamlining the experience for your content contributors, so again, this is more great feedback. Thanks!
Short answer: Yes, the nav widget is probably unsuitable for this functionality (except as noted below). If there are 20 pages of content related to a department or division, it seems a bit impractical to add all of those as section (sub) pages by way of the navigation mode.
The exception would be that, as discussed as an idea elsewhere, that folders of pages could be attached to sections in the navigation mode and be seen as part of the nav tree. At least this way, CM1 would know that they could be included in a nav widget. If this were the way to go, the nav widget would still have to have a setting to include or not include free-standing pages as part of the menu.
Most of the time, one would not want to have a menu that dropped down a long list of pages (hence the benefit of displaying these pages through an auto-list.)
Obviously, I don’t know the complexity or the relative merits of altering a widget to have more functionality but from my perspective, it seems as though giving the page auto list more robust filtering capability is in keeping with the design direction of the current widget. That is, it already filters, it just needs to be able to filter by tag, category, and position of the widget relative to the location of the page on which it lives.
Thanks for the additional context, Dan!
We also need this ability badly but I want to up-vote Categories.
Also, please give us the ability to make the links absolute or relative. This is extremely important when publishing several sites on different domains and pulling lists of pages between them.
Upvote for category and tag filtering. Surprised it’s not supported by design.