I was just thinking that now that we have all these awesome features where we can hide components, CSS rules, select visibility of CSS and JS on different pages, disable entire CSS files, etc… it would be really useful if there was a way that the program could sort of generate a log file of all the things that are hidden, visible, what is what on which page, etc…
Because it’s so easy to hide stuff that is nested deeply, often (especially when copying CSS or components between pages or entire websites,) you can lose track of things you may have hidden just for a particular client because they wanted something temporarily disabled (for example, a link to a social media page that’s under construction) and then you copy that nifty component to another website, but you forget that it’s got that hidden link with an icon because it’s nested many divs deep (if that makes sense?)
A text-based log file that shows a summary of everything that’s currently hidden, visible, disabled, enabled, and on what pages could come in very handy at times. And being able to generate either on save, or export, or just selectively via a button or menu link would be great. Or even just have it as an option to always generate a log, and make it selectible (on or off.)
I like this idea too. I would think that only “changed” items would really need to be on it such as anything on the Options panel that is changed from the default changes to visibility settings, etc.
I think this would be a good tool to help us not recreate things that are already done, but hidden and we missed it. In the case of what @printninja was saying, something layers deep that a specific client wanted added or hidden etc. and later you use that component for another client and they want something like what was hidden and you just remake it not realizing it’s already there. I don’t foresee this being something that happens often for me though, I check everything quite thoroughly when I reuse components, but that don’t say it won’t ever happen lol.
I wouldn’t say this is something detrimental to usability so I would put more important tasks ahead of this, but I think at some point this would be a nice feature.
Another use feature of this is if it could also incorporate the changes made during each session rather than a long list. This would help in fee calculations or if you forgot what you changed when you came back to invoice the customer or something similar.
I like the idea, hopefully it’s something doable at some point.
I wouldn’t call it a priority either, but I suspect that the program already keeps track of all this info in some database type format anyway, so it shouldn’t be very hard to just take the contents of the database, select which items to show in the log (and yes, any default settings that haven’t been changed would certainly be best to omit) and then just save it as a plain text file export with a .log extension. I often build new clients websites simply by taking an existing site I’ve already built and using it as the foundation for the new site. That’s when I would mostly refer to the log, so I could see a “lay of the land” so to speak, when I start.
Wouldn’t that be more of a comments thing? For me that scenario is better served using good coding comments. I also like having the ability to reuse sites as a whole or a starting point. I would find it a whole lot more user friendly to print out the files needed and refer to the comments. Also they are much easier to search than a log file.
Just my take on the scenario, but I still like the idea of log files.
I guess the difference is, comments have to be written by the user, which equates to time and effort. The info on visibility, disabled classes, etc… already exists by virtue of the changes having been made, so having the program export into a log should be extremely simple, and wouldn’t require any additional work on our part.