[UX] Provide a UI for selecting regions for any blocks that are orphaned during layout template change.

[klonos]

In the default layout, if you switch from the default "2 columns" template/design to the "2 columns flipped", the user login block that resides in the sidebar is preserved, but if you switch to the "1 column" design, the block disappears. If you now switch back to any of the "2 columns" or "2 columns flipped" design, the sidebar region is empty and the user login block gone.

We should warn users about the blocks that are going to be removed/lost from the action of changing a layout design with different regions. I think a confirmation page is in order here with a list of block names with the respective region in parenthesis.

Ideally though, we should also give the chance for users to place the blocks to the available regions in the new design instead of simply removing them. So, next to each block to be removed in the confirmation page list, we should also have drop-downs with all the available regions in the new design to be selected.

Even more ideally, instead of drop-downs and a separate confirmation page, we would have the new design displayed with its regions and the blocks that were preserved, plus an additional area on the side (a "pseudo-region" if you like, like the one that @quicksketch suggested for the page title in #952, marked with a red border perhaps) that holds all the blocks to be removed with a help text along the lines of:

"The new design that you have selected for the [layout_name] layout has different regions than the previous design. As a result, the blocks listed below are left without a region. Please select any of them that you wish to keep in the new design and drag it to the new available regions."

UX++

[docwilmot]

I agree blocks shouldnt be lost on switching layouts.

For simplicity though, couldnt we just pile all 'leftover' blocks that have lost their region into the main, or some other region? The user can then just drag and drop them to an appropriate region or delete them.

[klonos]

For simplicity though, couldnt we just pile all 'leftover' blocks that have lost their region into the main, or some other region? The user can then just drag and drop them to an appropriate region or delete them.

We could implement this as a quick intermediate solution. Although moving orphaned blocks to a random/arbitrary region without any other indication of this action is an improvement over removing them completely, it still is not perfect.

We could for starters go on with the simple, intermediate solution of having orphaned blocks moved to the main content area (or any other existing region we decide), but if we stop there, I see this as solving a buggy behavior by replacing it with another bug (blocks lost/data loss vs. blocks moved to random region).

I guess it won't be much of an issue with simple cases where the only block that was in the content region was the "Main content" block, but it might get worse with more elaborate designs. So lets then do either of these:

a) warn the user with a list of blocks that will be left orphans by changing the layout design and more importantly, tell them in which region we will be moving them to.

b) move these blocks into a temporary pseudo-region and visually indicate it (emphasis with a red border?).

Out of the two choices above, of course I prefer the second because we do not make the user remember which blocks were left orphans and we don't mix them with other blocks in the main content area. We clearly move them in a separate place. But I understand if implementing such a solution (the pseudo-region thing) is hard. Just thought that if we do implement such a region for #952, then we could reuse it for this case too.

[ghost]

👍

[ghost]

@klonos Is this still relevant? I believe some work has gone into making changing layouts easier re. orphaned blocks, but not sure if that was before or after this was filed...

[klonos]

So the way that this has been implemented is that any "orphaned" blocks are moved to the last region of the layout + we throw a warning to let the user know that this has happened (we also list the names of the orphaned blocks that ended in the last region). I still stand by this though:

...moving orphaned blocks to a random/arbitrary region without any other indication of this action is an improvement over removing them completely, it still is not perfect.

So it's OK to move say 1 or 2 orphaned blocks in the last region, but this is usually the footer, which may contain non-orphaned blocks too. Also, the message does say which blocks have been moved, but does not say which region each one was placed previously, nor does it say anything about their order/weight.

I believe that we can do better than that 😄