A Must-Have, Esp. with lots of pages & clients.

OVERALL
CMS Tree Page View is an invaluable plugin that make managing your page order a cinch, and is especially useful when migrating content from older sites to the client’s new WP install. CMS Tree Page View is a default addition to all my new WP setups. I absolutely recommend it.

THE GOOD
CMS Tree Page View is visual, and most clients understand the notion of drag and drop. When one has more than 100 pages, in practice, CMS Tree Page View mostly replaces the “All pages” view due to its compactness and its ability to present a clear visualization of the page hierarchy.

You can set the Tree View (for any post-types) right on the dashboard; clients get this. Access to the Tree View can be made to appear as a menu item in the left sidebar, which creates a universal access to the tree for that particular post-type.

One can add hierarchies to any post-type in the settings.

CMS Tree Page View has never caused a conflict with any other plugin that I’ve used.

Until such time as the WP team can create a “compact tree-view” in the All Pages list view, it’s here to stay.

THE BAD
There is no bad. Honestly. The only limitation that I’ve found was due to the fact that the UI has to be done in a a web-page, and is done well enough to have the user believe that HTML and AJAX should operate as smoothly as a native OS UI.

I have found that on occasion the moving the pages can get a touch fiddly, but that is corrected by a touch more attention.

The mild irritation of the fiddliness is a testament that it works very well; the user expects a web-based UI element to operate as slickly as a native UI element because it’s in the same league. Had it been clunky, the user would not have this expectation.

THE WISH LIST
I ran into a gotcha: I was migrating content from an old site, to a new WP install. I entered pages in the order found in the previous site. The admin listed the pages correctly, but the front-end navigation menus, sorted by order_number ascending, weren’t reflecting this order.

I was baffled until I realized that I had not set an order number to the new pages. By default, WP sets an order number of 0 to new articles. I had mistaken the view of titles entered in sequence for “sorted by number order”–the titles were in the right order, but there were no order numbers set.

This led to some confusion for an hour or so.

The fix, of course is obvious, move each element around so that CMSTPV will assign an order number, or manually enter numbers in All Pages list view or per-record.

It might be useful to have a “No order number set” somewhere that is both obvious and unobtrusive.

Perhaps an additional feature some form of “auto set orders” for children pages might be included.

As one can tell, the only issues that I’ve had with the plugin was a user interface subtlety, a “who could have foreseen that?” scenario.

I strongly recommend the CMS Tree Page View for people who want to boss their content order around with minimal fuss.