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I'm building sites using Views and Panels, as you do. When handing over to the client/content editor, I want to make things as user-friendly as possible. Ideally this means they don't need to get their heads around View settings, but sometimes it seems unavoidable even for the simplest things? Or maybe I'm not designing the IA the best way...

Example: a movie review site, where each review is a node. On the homepage, we have a 'featured reviews' display with preview images for 3 movies. So I make a View that selects the 3 most recent reviews, and use some nice imageslider display or whatever. Nice.

Then the client asks if he can manually override this, and manually choose which 3 reviews to feature. He expects to just go into 'homepage settings' or something and select from a list.

So what to do... introduce him to Views filters and selecting node IDs...? Not good :(

So I resort to adding a 'featured' checkbox to the review content type, and filtering the view that way. Now this is easier for him, but still means ticking boxes on and off in various nodes. And it means I'm using content fields for something that isn't really content.

I run into this kind of situation very often, so wondered what other developers do?

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For that particular use case, I'd suggest using the Nodequeue module. You could set up the nodequeue to contain 3 items and then users with the correct privileges would have the ability to add new items to the queue by clicking on a link on the node they want to add. In addition, users with permission to the administrative side of the Nodequeue module can also control the sorting of the items in the queue.

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  • This is the perfect solution, nodequeue gives content authors the ability to easily drag and drop views ordering through a simple GUI.
    – wiifm
    Apr 9, 2011 at 4:40
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There is no universal solution. Views 3 for D7 has a nicer UI, but letting a client go near it will never be very smart. I see nothing wrong with adding a checkbox, like you did.

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Clearly, this is a situation where the initial requirements are changed by your client; this means it's quite normal to not expect the implementation to adapt nicely to the (modified) use case.

What I recommend for the case used as example is to create the normal page display and an accompanying page, used as administrative panel as local tasks (tabs); in the "administrative" display, you just use something like nodequeue or draggable views to give the user the possibility to sort the nodes arbitrarily.

A more powerful approach would be to use panels instead of views, allowing the client to administrate it using the nice In Place Editor that ships in. Though I think this could require much more work from you to streamline the content editing workflow for your client.

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