Feature Request: Edit Page's Structure View should have a preview of contents

[cagejsn]

Hi all,

I am writing to share something that came up on my project team at work.
We are using Django CMS to power a site for Onboarding people to a company.

We have a team of 2 UX designers, 2 non-technical (change management) and 1 Dev (me).

The UX Designers and the non-technical people are the ones who are actually editing content in the admin & edit pages.

They brought up that the structure view can get overwhelming for the editor.

I propose that the Structure View not use the Name of the Plugin, but rather something customizable which may of may not include the "name" of the plugin.

[cagejsn]

This is the view I am talking about:

When it appears as a side bar on the right I am not seeing the addition descriptive text.

[marksweb]

It's up to the plugins, not the CMS itself what is displayed in the structure view.

Take an example from a site of mine using djangocms-frontend where plugins are fairly identifiable

[cagejsn]

How do you configure the Plugin's Text that is shown? I looked in the docs to try and figure this out, and I was unable to. Maybe I missed something. I am happy to update the documentation if it's not present.

[fsbraun]

It's the plugin model's get_short_description() method that returns a content summary for the plugin.

[fsbraun]

What I'd love to see is that the available space is better used, especially if the side bar fills the whole viewport. The text shown is shortened too early after three words by the djangocms-text-ckeditor plugin imho:

[cagejsn]

There should be an entry here for get_short_description no?
https://docs.django-cms.org/en/latest/reference/plugins.html#cms.models.pluginmodel.CMSPlugin

perhaps also here?
https://docs.django-cms.org/en/latest/how_to/custom_plugins.html#how-to-create-plugins

[fsbraun]

Yes, there should! Would you like to create a Pull Request to add this? I'd really appreciate it!

[cagejsn]

Yes I can do that!