Content for User manual of Volto, the Plone 6 frontend

Documentation
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Hello everyone,
It's been a week since I joined the Plone organization and I am amazed by the people in this community😊 who helped me a lot and so I would like to contribute more to this organization.
I was trying to contribute to this issue Create end-user Editor documentation #3827 and made my first PR (which got successfully merged yay! thanks steve).
But as I was looking at the issues section to find more things to add to the user manual, I thought it's better to start a thread here, so we can discuss with everyone about the undocumented things of the Volto which should be their in the user manual.
We had a discussion on discord about this but since discord has a small audience, it will be better if we discuss things here so more people can help us with the content.
Please share anything you think should be on the user manual here #3827.

I think this post got too long ... sorry for that but I was so restless to ask all this​:rofl::sweat_smile:.

cc: @stevepiercy

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I can mention some stuff:

  • the Document Review State (private/public) right now it's hard to discern, it's only marked by the color of the left-side toolbar handle. (IMHO the whole toolbar should be colored with a significant color)
  • the right side sidebar handle, people had issues and didn't know how to open and close it. What's worse (for new Volto editors), once you close the sidebar, it stays closed and the whole thing is lacking contrast and you won't know how to open it. It's a big UX problem.
  • the Contents (/content) view deserves its own chapter. Beyond the sorting of columns, multi-file upload capability, one thing is worth mentioning, the clipboard is single tab only, it won't work with multiple browser tabs.
  • The ObjectBrowser is worth mentioning (allow creating internal "links")
  • the Link button and the behavior when you create a new link. You can write there external links, as well, not just internal, and you can even enter mailto: and tel: links. Worth mentioning is the fact that the dialog closes when you click outside it, and whatever change you make there has to be validated by clicking the -> arrow button

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I really appreciate you taking the time to share this here .

  1. I didn't even notice the handle color changes with the state. Each time I have to look at my publishing state manually. yep, we can give a light shade of that color to the whole toolbar IG. I'll open an issue if it is not done already.
  2. Not only changing its contrast what if we change it to "<" when closed and back to a vertical line when opened?
  3. do you mean when I copy something in tab-1, it should not be in the clipboard of tab-2, right?
  4. ,5. I'll mention these in issue #3827's comments where we are collecting all undocumented bits in one place.
    Thanks for your reply tiberiuichim😊.
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do you mean when I copy something in tab-1, it should not be in the clipboard of tab-2, right?

the multi-block copy/paste works across tabs (uses localstorage for data store). The document copy/paste operations from /content use the Redux store, so that data is not share across multiple tabs. This is annoying, at least to me, when I have to deal with doc management in Volto, as I like to work with multiple tabs.

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I'll mention these in issue #3827's comments

Please do not. Create end-user Editor documentation · Issue #3827 · plone/volto · GitHub is for documenting how the editor in Volto is used now.

Instead please create new issues in the Volto issue tracker. Thank you!

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Ohh no, I thought ObjectBrowser is part of the editor in volto ... sorry if it was not, sure then I won't mention it there. Thanks for letting me know!

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opened ticket #4130 referring this issue.

sorry for the delayed response, my end sem exams were going on😅

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#4131

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Hello there, I have gone through almost every section of User-manual for Plone5 and got a grip on how our User-manual for Plone 6 should be structured and accordingly made a proposal (covering many topics) but before I present it in a PR (if none is made by someone), I have few questions (plz it'll be a great help if someone can answer) :

  • There are some topics in Plone5 manual (like Conceptual overview, Logging In etc. ) which are common for Plone6 and making our user jump from plone6 user-manual to plone5 is not a good idea I guess. So, can we copy such topics (with minor changes) from Plone5 to Plone6 (they are already so well written)?
  • Does Plone 6 (Volto) have Portlet / Portlet Management section? I think I have missed it.
  • There are some Plone 6 Docs that have "Note" saying it's incomplete, but do we have something (To Do list, etc) which is keeping track of these incomplete docs? If not, can we create an issue with the Task List of all the incomplete docs linked to their respective page? bcz to me they seem lost in there.

I hope I am not bothering you with such a long comment :slight_smile: Thanks!