How to organise dope sheet keyframes with color or strips/groups and how to change the order of displaying animations?

Question

I'm animating a book with a lot of pages, and few objects defines a single page animation (I'm talking about latices, empties and meshes). Using NLA isn't a good way of organise this kind of animations, because it can make strips only with bones, or animations of an one single object.

Animations of three cubes looks terrible in this editor, and it can not be joined into one strip/group. So if I wanted to offset all animations I need to select 3 different Actions blocks.

Dope sheet is better, but it still is confusing when you dealing with a lot of keyframes of different objects (think that you need to offset a few keyframes, that you couldn't label in any way, and you need to search for them in thousends of keyframes looking all the same - grey dots...)

Is there any way (maybe an add-on?) to color keyframes? It would help a lot:

Or is there any way (maybe an add-on) to organise keyframes into group/frames/strips?:

And also I hate that I can not change (or I don't know how to change?) the order of displaying animations in Dope Sheet. The list is always alphabetical, but sometimes I want to change keyframes of 2 objects, and it would be nice if they were one right on top of another even that one object is called "A-something" and the other one "Z-something", and there are lot's of objects with animations on the scene that they have names starting with different letters.

I know that you can HIDE the keyframes of other objects by hiding those objects so for example we can display 2 animations in Dope Sheet Editor from hundreds of animations (which is nice), but it's also mean that I could not see the other objects on the scene (which really sucks). Are there any add-ons to fix that problems?

Answer 1

There is some built-in color coding. Select a keyframe in the dope sheet, and press R, you should see a list of options. The same is available in the timeline, see: New Keyframe Types

Answer 2

I found it. Its located in the Dope Sheet menu bar: click on "Channels", then look for "Move..." and there are the hot keys! Basically, when you click a channel (a row) on the Dope Sheet, you can press the "Page Up" and "Page Down" buttons to move up and down your selected channel. Hope this helped. Also hold "Shift" + "Page Up" or "Shift" + "Page Down" to move the selected channel to the top or bottom of the channel rows. This also works with multiple selected channel rows!

Answer 3

The only thing I can contribute which gets close to what you're after is grouping the dope sheet channels - ShiftLMB the channels and then CtrlG. You can name the groups, move them up and down using Page Up and Page Down (you can do this with individual channels within the group too).

It doesn't quite display as you want, but does at least allow you to collapse the groups down to a single line whilst still seeing their overall context. Color coding would be a really nice addition though.