Before going any further, I want to say how much I am enjoying Elements and the powers that it brings me.
However, I do find working wth Globals is unbelievably error-prone – and in the same way every time. I find myself saying “Damn it! I’ve done it again” too many times … the situation being editing a global and forgetting to flag that this an override before I do it.
I appreciate that the 'undo’ing mechanism in Elements is impressive – but I often don’t realise my error until I switch to another page and see the changes there as well.
What I would love to have instead is a "globals editor’ in which I am only editing the global and in which I can indicate what aspects can be overridden in usage (the text string in a typography component, but maybe none of its presentation; or an image in an image component, but none of its presentation). Outside of the globals editor (i.e. in the normal editor) only the overridable settings would be visible for a global component.
If I need to change something that is not currently overridable, then I have to go into the globals editor and enable it.
Finally, and a more long-term wish, would be that globals might be hierarchical, inheriting their properties (and overridable properties) from a parent. If I edit the parent then all the children will change, but the individual children can be adjusted too. I think this is probably more complex in reality, but something like this would be fantastic.
And one more thing – one really needs to be able to see how many times a global is being used and on which pages – I find myself collecting lots of globals and many are no longer useful, or being used, but it is very difficult to delete them. The dialogue box appears saying that the global will disappear from all pages where it is being used, but gives me no indication of how much that might matter.
Or am I missing something - some tool, or window – where this information is already available?
These have been longstanding problems with globals that have been complained about since the early BETA days.
I have always felt that there needed to be guardrails around globals, so that when you make a change without doing an override, you get a warning before the change is applied. LOCKING parts of the global would prevent accidental changes to unmodifiable items until the global or property is unlocked.
Back in the day, @dan said they had plans for some guardrails around globals, but to date nothing has happened.
To this day, after all the time I have been using Elements, I still blow it occasionally and make a change while forgetting to override. Or worse yet, accidentally move some element in a global, and everything gets reset to the default values, ouch.
