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The About section in a new Textpattern installation
I had an interesting experience of showing a Wordpress user the basics of Textpattern this morning. It was an eye-opening experience that I’m taking some interesting feedback from. One of the points raised was regarding the About section, which ships with a default installation.
Normally, I strip out the default content and start afresh, but it strikes me that, from a UX point of view, it follows that clicking on the About link should show something aside from just the page scaffold.
Are there historical reasons why there is nothing in About?
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Re: The About section in a new Textpattern installation
gaekwad wrote #282156:
Are there historical reasons why there is nothing in About?
Probably. Don’t think Txp shipped with an About section until fairly recently (may be wrong), but we’ve always only had one pre-defined article so there’s not so much cruft to delete to get started.
A few options:
- Add another article in the About section.
- Pros: has content shown.
- Cons needs deleting if you don’t want it, or overwriting if you do.
- Add static content in the
defaultPage template inside a conditional tag.- Pros: shows content.
- Cons: poor content/presentation separation, possibly leading to bad learned practice for new users.
- Add dedicated Page template for About section.
- Pros: shows how to use different Pages to serve different types of content.
- Cons: still requires an article to populate it (or use static content, with the same pitfalls as above); may lead new users to think that one webpage or one Section = one Page template is the norm.
- Remove the About section entirely.
- Pros: No empty content.
- Cons: Limited menu navigation looks a bit lean with only ‘Home’ and ‘Articles’; might be construed more bloggish than corporate (ummm, tentative!)
There are no doubt other options depending on the needs to balance getting people over the learning hump vs. people who don’t want to wade through cruft and a load of deletions just to get back to a blank canvas.
Either way, documenting the process of watching new users going through the learning curve is a valuable experience to help hone the UX and interface, so please share this if you can (even privately).
A blank page is a little disconcerting so whichever method is best, we should do.
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Txp Builders – finely-crafted code, design and Txp
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Re: The About section in a new Textpattern installation
The Articles section is useful because it contains an article, so reinforces the nomenclature behind the scenes – or maybe it serves to pigeonhole articles into the Article section. I’ll check with my patsy, see what she thinks of this.
Magento does a neat thing where there is additional, optional downloadable content that can be merged to populate a site with stuff, presumably for acclimatising new users to Magento’s UI, with the quirks and foibles. I’m comparing apples and oranges to a certain extent, of course, but the UX of a new install is crucial in turning evaluators into users.
The About link is a clunking stop right now, and based on the above suggestions I’m +1’ing Remove the About section completely.
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Re: The About section in a new Textpattern installation
Whatever it takes to ease people into the Txp workflow while not annoying power users.
Let’s see if we can fold Phil into the discussion here since he’ll probably be the person making any actual changes as a result.
The smd plugin menagerie — for when you need one more gribble of power from Textpattern. Bleeding-edge code available on GitHub.
Txp Builders – finely-crafted code, design and Txp
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