Folders: 'Browse by folder' only ever shows one collection at the top level?

[jeremyProwseYS]

When clicking "browse by folder" in the admin panel, only one collection is ever visible at the top level, even if multiple collections have had folders enabled:

• In this example only the "Media" collection's items display in the top level even though "Posts" and "Pages" also have folders enabled

Once you navigate into a specific folder, mixed-collection content is shown:

• In this example we can see "Pages" and "Posts" displaying in the current folder

The issue I guess I'm highlighting is that the functionality is inconsistent - one view shows only one collection while the other shows all collections present.

Proposal

There are a couple of ways to refine this I can think of:

Note that I am only talking about the global "Browse By Folder" view here, not the folder view available in each collection, these should remain unchanged.

1. Hide any documents that haven't been assigned a folder.

Users would need to navigate to the collection and document they wish to organize and then move that document into a folder, as it would not display in "root" level of the global "Browse By Folder" view by default.

Pros

• Makes the functionality consistent, only documents that have been sorted into folders are visible in this view.
• Avoids loading in a large number of documents from various collections into the "root" folder view.

Cons

• Could be confusing for users if they click "Browse By Folder" and nothing shows by default. This could be avoided by a simple message if no folders have been created, similar to what already exists here:

2. Show all Collections that have folders enabled in the "Browse By Folder" view by default.

Ideally these would be organized under their collection names to make it easier to differentiate content types, something like this:

Pros

• Collections with folders enabled all show at the root level similar to how you might expect "unsorted" files in something like a computer OS or cloud storage like Google Drive to operate.

Cons

• Could get unwieldy quickly, especially if there are collections with a lot of documents. Some sort of limitation would need to be in place on the number of docs that can show at one time. This could then require pagination making the whole system even more complicated.

Keen to hear others thoughts on this, but on the whole the folders functionality is great!