Some of these have already been mentioned elsewhere, but I wanted to try and put them all in one place, as much as I could remember. I’ll add more if I think of more. Others can add ideas too.
Page titles (as are displayed in browser tabs) - can they reflect the page consistently?
Currently the forum is just ‘ctlgs’, as are most edit form pages. Book and Edition pages for the same title are the same as each other. It makes it hard to work out which of the many browser tabs I have open is which.
After clicking the ‘add’ button when adding a new credit-role/date/code/whatever, the focus ought to be on the item drop-down so that all that’s required is to start typing to find the role/date/code/etc. Currently we need to click in the role select drop-down and then start typing. Some attention should be paid towards editing workflow in general, I think.
Opening a dropdown to select a credit-role/code/date from the list, when one has already been selected, should jump the list to your selection’s position. So if I select “Copyright Holder (Text)” from the list, then think better of it and decide it’d be more sensible to have just plain old “Copyright Holder”, I can just pop open the list and scroll the short distance from “Copyright Holder (Text)” to “Copyright Holder”. Currently I’m back at the start of the list and need to find it all over again.
Edit previews should reflect the look of the final page, including formatting/layout of fields and parsing html. Right now the previews seem to behave differently for each entity type.
Ultimately, items in an edit form should have links to a relevant help/rules item. Perhaps even a short-form version of the help below the input box. That way a user can immediately learn/be reminded of what the field is intended for, and be able to find out more (without losing any edits if they click away).
If the Raw Edit view can stay (and I hope it can) can it be possible to switch from form to raw view without losing any changes that may have been made in either?
The raw edit allows me to make large, similar changes to a submission (adding many same-role credits, moving fields around, etc) without having to go through the tedious process of adding fields to the form - which can become very slow to do when there are a lot of credits, but it won’t let me create new credits, which I have to do in the edit form.
I have to submit what I’ve done so far in order to not lose it so I can switch from raw to form edit.
The raw edit also allows me to ‘park’ an edit by copy/pasting to Notepad++ and then coming back to it later without worrying about losing the edit when the browser decides to ‘forget’ the tab to save memory. If I can switch to raw from form view without losing edits to the form, then I could ‘park’ that too.
Show all the name variations used for a credit, ideally with the ability to filter the list of Editions to show only those that use those variations.
Can we get alerts if someone edits something in our Collection, Wantlist, Contributions, or a submission which we’ve edited (or ‘followed’ if we can introduce that concept, and perhaps auto-follow something we’ve edited)?
Can we also have the ability to ping someone in an edit? Useful to draw someone’s attention to something they may be able to help with.
The ability to revert to a specific point in the submission history (including image edits). At some point there’s going to be database vandalism, and it’d be good to have some way of a) knowing it was going on, and b) reverting it! We could do this now with the diff view from History, combined with Raw Edit, but it’s a bit cumbersome and won’t help with image edits.
Add comments to submission history? With alerts for contributors to that entity.
If the Chapters text on an Edition takes up fewer than, say, 10 lines (or the element has a larger height than 10 times the line height, or something), I don’t think it needs to be truncated by default.
A Description value for each entity property would be very useful, so we can make any additional qualifications about it, or what the field relates to if there are multiple occurrences, etc.
Examples:
When a copyright credit for illustrations only applies to some, or one illustration, being able to specify “Copyright Holder (Illustrations) (Back cover)”
When an ISBN appears with variations in several places.
Editions with multiple sub-Editions. In detail here: Boxed sets and other multi-volume Editions
Can we have ‘Paperback - UK A-Format’, ‘Paperback - UK B-Format’ and ‘Paperback - UK C-Format’ added?
Currently I have no idea whether ‘Mass-Market Paperback’ applies to all of those formats, or one, and which one if only one, or none. I think that the whole Format list needs some revision, and it would also be useful to show an explanation of what each format means when selecting from them.
On the Edition and Book pages, the property values that are displayed above the edit button are a variable distance from their respective labels - there’s a large horizontal gap between, eg, the “Author” label and the author value can be far apart from each other, especially on a maximised browser window.
This is currently an html table. Perhaps the labels could be in an column that exactly fits the size of them?
Add more than one copy of an Edition to my Collection
Create custom collection fields (public and private, so I can assign things like various aspects of condition, physical location, origin, purchase price, date, etc, per copy)
The ability to customise which entity fields I see in my Collection/Read/Wantlist view, and for them to be searchable, groupable, sortable
Same as above for Book, Credit, etc pages
Virtual bookshelves that allow a user to collate selected items in specific views - perhaps even across catalogues. Shelves could be shareable so people can, I don’t know, show off parts of their collection, or curate specific collections of works - not necessarily ones they have in their collection - perhaps something a bit like discogs’ Lists, but on steroids!
The ability to display our collection in different ways (list, table, cards, something else?)
At some point we’re going to need data export controls!