Preceden's New Drag and Drop Repositioning

In December 2018 we rolled out an impactful update, changing the way that Preceden displays events on timelines.

The Old Way: Waterfall vs Collapsed

In the past, Preceden gave you layout options: Waterfall or Collapsed.

In a Waterfall layout, every event is placed on its own row:

In a Collapsed layout, every event is placed as high in the layer as possible:

We had a lot of requests for more flexibility. For example, imagine the events positioned like this:

This timeline is neither Waterfall (because two events are on the same line) nor is it Collapsed (because the two development events have empty space above them).

The New Way: Drag and Drop

In order to give people more control over where events are placed on their timelines, we took a step back and reimagined what the experience could look like.

What we came up with is a completely new way of positioning events on your timeline.

Here's how it works:

• Events are positioned in a waterfall layout by default
• However, you can now drag and drop events within a layer to reposition them
• If you want the events to automatically be compressed, check the box under Appearance > Layers > Automatically compress layers. You can still reorder compressed events using this drag and drop functionality.
• You can read more about the details here: Reposition Events with Drag and Drop

Not only can you use this to position events the way they were in the old Collapsed layout, but you can also position events in locations that were never possible in the past.

Pretty cool, right?

In addition to giving you more control over the position of events, this change allowed us to simplify the user interface. For example, there is no longer a Reorder Events link above the timelines, and the timeline and layout settings no longer include the Waterfall and Collapsed options.

The only downside is that this new system is not backwards compatible with the old system. Meaning, if you had layers using a Collapsed layout or you used the old Reorder Events feature to change the order of events, your timelines will no longer reflect those settings. However, you can now drag and drop those elements to position them in a way that makes the most sense for your timeline.

If you run into any issues or have any feedback on this, we'd love to hear from you: [email protected].