I think the following simple feature extensions could greatly expand the ability of the platform to support sophisticated workflows and - at the same time - simplify the environment for authors and editors.
The feature extensions:
- allow menu items to point to saved filters in addition to models and external URLs
- allow the content model to be specified in a filter
- allow saved filters to be restricted to specific roles, in the same way content types are today
Allowing menu items to point to saved filters would be an easy way for authors and editors to quickly find the documents that admins wanted them to see. If I wanted editors to only see blog posts that matched a particular category, I could set up filter for this view and then make is easy to list the relevant documents by providing a menu item that pointed directly to the filter. For example “weather editors” could have a menu item that loaded only the unpublished blogs in the weather category.
If I could write a filter that specified the content model, I could have much more powerful filters that loaded a subset of content, but across multiple models. For example, I could write a filter that allowed my weather editors to view unpublished blog posts, comments and headline articles tagged to the weather category all in a single filter.
Finally, if I could limit access to saved filters (or to menu items) to particular roles, I could avoid cluttering the UI for other roles and reduce the likelihood that users that shouldn’t be messing in these filters and menu items would be there.
I love the simple but powerful capabilities of Dato’s authoring studio. I think these hopefully simple extensions would provide a great deal of power and simplicity for editors and authors.
