feincms/feincms — Issue #242: Dynamic regions for flexible content placement
Author: woutervandergraaf
Created: 2012-02-07 16:21:22+00:00
State: open

A lot of sites we created in FeinCMS required content to be positioned with a lot more flexibility than FeinCMS offered.

1. Sometimes some arbitrary content items just needed to be wrapped together inside a container with special styling (background, border, etc.)
2. Occasionally a website needed a more flexible grid-like approach. For example, one page needed to have 3 rows, 2 columns each (6 regions), but another page 4+2+3 regions (9 regions!), and a lot more variations.

You could argue that this is easily solved by making a lot of different templates with a lot of region tabs. Probably, but that wouldn't work for case 1. And for case 2 that would mean a lot of searching for templates and spreading of content items across region tabs. Not so user friendly.

We should envision a more flexible approach to content generation and placement. Dynamic regions, where the user can play with different layouts and region styles (within the rules set by the website designer), could be a revolutionary addition to FeinCMS. One that could attract a lot of attention to the project.

Think of a toolbox of layout types, not unlike the current content types you put in a region. Every layout type has it's own customization options (like content types). Some layout types can be nested. Some can only contain particular content types. And of course a new user interface in the admin to accomodate this kind of flexibility.

What do you think?

Wouter