Provide visual cue for editors that a folderish page is part of the site structure

[fredvd]

One thing that has been confusing or rather slightly annoying while editing content in a Volto site is that everything in my (top) site hierarchy is a Page. I am lost without seeing the main site structure if I’m not reading every page title to umderstand it is a branch. I want my folders back !! 🤣 But I realise adding back the folder ct just for that is not worth it.

I had an insight though: it is only the editing UI where I want to see this. What if we index an extra property on every (Page) item that stores if the page has any direct sub pages? And with that info show a slightly different Icon on the folder contents to signal that this page is part of the site structure. That would do it for me as a visual cue for the branches between the leaves.

The icons shoudn’t switch for only contained images and files in a Page. Those are probably part of the blocks layout on the page.

We could even create 3 or 4 icons, where the folder icons are similar slightly differ on how much they are filled: if more than x pages are there or if there are sib sub pages. I do wonder what the indexing costs would be for this with a very large site. Then again, you could let the indexer run only when content is added and recalculate/reindex the parents.

Is something like this feasible? is the folderish page vs 'structural folder' UX debate partly addressed in Quanta? @sneridagh @tiberiuichim

( mostly copied from discussion at https://community.plone.org/t/why-is-volto-overriding-classical-dexterity-types/15895/4 )

[tiberiuichim]

We would need a catalog metadata field to inform of the number of children, then this information can be plugged in the UI (the /contents view uses the @search endpoint)

[davisagli]

There was an idea from a long time ago to change the indexer for the existing is_folderish index so that it returns true if the item has children or allows children to be added (instead of just a static property of the content type). We would need to take a look at how is_folderish is currently used and make sure that won't cause problems. plone/CMFPlone#317 doesn't discuss the indexer explicitly but is related.

[avoinea]

I think that reindexing the parent everytime a child is added or removed will lead to ZODB ConflictErrors on sites with lot of editors.

[wesleybl]

@avoinea this reindexing is already done. See: plone/plone.volto#118 (comment)