Shared fields

I would like to use the new key “shared: true” in Kirby. What would it do, like “translate: false”, items marked as such have the same value in all languages. But the difference would be that the “shared: true” values would be shared in the kirby panel for all languages, and could be edited in any language.

Why? Because when multiple people edit a site and one speaks English and one speaks Czech, for example, each is used to editing in their own language (and using the Content Translator to simply translate the content into another language, for example). However, if the default language is, for example, CS and the user speaks EN natively, he has to edit some values in CS, because in his EN calibration these values are READ-ONLY.

This is confusing from a UX point of view. Many times users give me feedback that they can’t edit the site because they forgot to switch to the default language.

The solution would be to use a “shared: true” key that would synchronize the values with each other and make it possible to edit those values in any language.

This way, each user can make changes in their language and items where it makes sense (like a cover blog article) will sync to other languages automatically because it has a files field key of “shared: true”.

Are there more of us here who would welcome shared (yet editable) items across languages?

I like this idea to make fields editable and sync in any language. While I think that editors can learn it quickly that grayed out fields have to be edited in the main language I wonder why they shouldn’t be able to do so in the language they’re currently in. Maybe the locking mechanism is a reason for it. If both languages are currently edited you would get a merge conflict. One could prevent that by making the fields update in realtime. But that sounds like a lot of work.