I fear that this request may properly belong rather low on your priority list. My website has 1805 pages. If I wish to attach a link to an element on a page, I find the “On Click” entry in the Style inspector. I select “Go to Page in this Website” and then I click on the pop-up menu listing the pages. That pop-up menu is 1805 items long. Oof! They do not appear to be organized in any way.
It would be immensely easier for me if, instead of one monstrously long menu, the menu were organized in the standard tree-structured system used in so many applications, such as the Finder:
I realize that few websites have this many pages, hence the need for such a menu architecture is not so great for other people. However, even a list of just a few dozen items can still be oppressively long. I haven’t seen the user interface research on this, but my impression is that most people resort to subdirectories when a folder gets more than one or two dozen members. This suggests that any website with more than a few dozen pages would benefit from a tree-structured menu structure.
About four years ago I resolved to abandon Sandvox and several of my no-longer-trusted web expert friends assured me that WordPress was the ideal website editor to jump to. Another no-longer-trusted web expert offered to convert my website to WordPress format. I paid her $4000 for her work, then started to work learning to edit in WordPress. I ran into the same problem with the menu for linking to on-site pages. I went to the WordPress user discussion forum, which I found to be badly organized, and posted a question as to whether this problem could be solved by some workaround. I got only two answers back, both rather snottily dismissing my problem. There went $4000. Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! Do you have ANY idea how much dog food I could have bought for that?
Anyway, the next time you’re just sitting around twiddling your thumbs, bored and thinking of whatever you might do to occupy yourself, please give a thought to this request.
Coming back to the Blog again, blog posts you can sort, link, comment, …
With just a huge amount of pages, only a blog system can handle this efficiently.
I feel with you and can share the pain with Wordpress, in the end Wordpress was never intended to build Websites with it.
Hmm… OK, I’ll look into the blogging capabilities of Sparkle. Having seen a great many blogs, I’m not optimistic about their utility but a) Sparkle might have some good organizational structures for blogs and b) if I’m ever to make that transition, now is the time.
you probably should tag @duncan for this to be seen, but the Sparkle team usually does not declares whats coming next regarding features, only fixes etc
Thanks, Primo. I read that discussion and that suggestion is not the same as mine – I’m requesting a text representation of a tree rather than a pictorial representation. But the concept is the same.
However, I came up with a better solution to my problem. I recalled that I had an old 2013 iMac in the attic. I dragged it downstairs, plugged it in, gave some food to the little hamsters inside so they’d start running in their little wheel, oiled the crankshaft, and fired it up. Then I simply AirDropped everything from my current Mac over to the ancient Mac and launched Sandvox. It worked perfectly, even with my special layout modifications!
There are a few handicaps. Any material I develop on my current Mac will have to be airdropped to the old Mac. I have to sacrifice some desktop space to the old Mac, but that space was being used by the cats for the bed they disdain to use.
So I must bid a fond adieu to Sparkle. We’ll always have Paris.
I don’t know what Sparkle will do but I have a similar problem with lots of pages on a website PaulCritchley.Art. My ‘work around’ is to label pages by year, i.e. 2023 exhibition 1 etc. so when I want to make a link I start to type in the year and will be taken to the section for that year which makes it easier t find the page I want to link to.
Interesting. First, are you doing this with Sparkle? Second, are you saying that, by typing in the year, it automatically selects for the menu all pages that match what you’re typing, allowing you to easily navigate a much shorter menu?
Yes I’m using Sparkle. I decided to use a system based on years because it relates to pages either for individual paintings or for exhibition. See screen shot for a link from a CV page to a page about an exhibition.
