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Re: [wiki] textbook css
Don’t worry, I realise now that the cunning plan I had wouldn’t have worked anyway, so I’ll cancel that request:) Sorry to trouble you, Patrick.
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Re: [wiki] textbook css
As I’ve mentioned before (somewhere), I’ve been involved with moving. We (family) are in, but still no internet connection yet so I’ve not been able to keep a presence here as normal. However, you don’t need an internet connection to work locally, so between the multitude of tasks that come with moving into a new house, like stripping all the unsightly wallpaper (wallpaper seemingly as cultural in France as baguettes), I’ve managed to put my TextBook design thoughts to canvas for everyone’s feedback.
A few notes:
- I’ve gone with a classic Textpattern theme (since I don’t know what the .com guys are cooking up) and tied all the txp family sites into it. I’ve said before that I appreciate the professional way the folks at WordPress have tied all their sites together under one coherent theme so I’ve borrowed from that concept. It’s different enough that nobody should get jumpy. Other sites besides WP have done similar (e.g., Paul Gu, if you consider his Forums), and in anycase it’s a tight way to bring different interfaces (site, blog, forum, wiki…) together that no versed UX designer would argue against.
- The mockups represent a typical interior content page (as opposed to the home/index page), and reflect a logged-in and logged-out state. The only difference being the appearance of the “edit” links and the state of the logged-in user tools in top right.
- I have not yet really given thought to the left column main topics; what you see there is really just placeholder, for what can simply be added later. Likewise the content of this page is arbitrary.
- The “Related Reading” list is an example of using a MW template to create a mini-navigation list for a given suite of pages. For example, let’s say you had “Five Steps to a Devastatingly Gorgious Textpattern Site,” and each step was a page devoted to itself. You could use the mini-nav list template in each of the five pages, providing a link for each page, so no matter which page you were on, it would be dead-easy and intuitive to jump from one page to another without the seagull-feeding pattern (fly up to top and dive back down) of browsing that is often typical of wikis. This mini-nav would always have the same position and presentation, authors would simply add the different links as needed for their mini-nav needs. Note this is not the same as the page “Contents” which is a mini-index of the current page.
- The images don’t show it, but the backgrounds of the header and footer will span the entire width of the screen, while the body is centered and has left and right margins. The total body width is pixels, while the contained divisions (three columns) are percentages. The min screen size targeted will be 1024, which should be acceptable in this community (and most of the web these days). A good print sheet will be created too, but nothing for mobile at this point (though anyone is welcome to give that a shot).
- What I foresee as being under the “Resources” link in the main menu is perhaps a wiki page location (e.g., Community Portal) that provides a list of profiles (Title, one paragraph description, site link) of all the Txp-related sites and resources having active standing, whether from TeamTextpattern or Joe Individual. (Personal blogs not included).
- These mockups are image files created on a winblows laptop that does not render fonts very well, so disregard the pixelly-looking fonts. For the most part what you are looking at is arial and verdana.
And finally the mocks:
I’ll start work on this in a local wiki (cuz I’ll probably use a variation of this locally regardless of what happens here), and roll into the dev wiki when I have internet connection again.
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Side:
The question that begs to be asked (assuming a common theme is used across sites) is who’s going to reskin the forum? :)
It should be easy to see how the forum could slip right into a theme I’m proposing without problems. Maybe I’ll do a mockup of that too just for fun; might have the following three mods, at least:
- Drop the “Txp Networks” dropdown since all those links will be accounted for already in one way or another.
- Drop the left and right columns to gain that main content area space for forum tables.
- [optional] Why not keep just the right column and put the “Jump to…” and “Search” controls at the top of it, and then run the names of logged-in users in a vertical list underneath that (as opposed to the typical, horizontal list at bottom).
EDIT: Orthography fixes.
Last edited by Destry (2008-08-18 14:51:57)
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Re: [wiki] textbook css
Yowzers, that looks sweeeeeet. Love the integrated look; to my (albeit untrained) eye it manages to be both classic Textpattern and contemporary at the same time. Very nice work.
Doubt I’m the right person to answer any of the questions, nor probably the right person to do any of the ‘doing’ when it comes to that stage, but if there’s a shortfall of any better-skilled people for editing grunt work / consistency checking, I’m willing to offer to do my best to learn ‘on the job’. Providing someone trusts me enough with a login.
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Re: [wiki] textbook css
Bloke wrote:
…it manages to be both classic Textpattern and contemporary at the same time.
Thanks, Bloke. “Sweeeeet“er words could not have been said about it.
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Re: [wiki] textbook css
The idea of a unified look for all those websites is very interesting! Looks lovely.
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Re: [wiki] textbook css
Destry wrote:
I’ve gone with a classic Textpattern theme (since I don’t know what the .com guys are cooking up) and tied all the txp family sites into it.
+100. I like the overall look, but the extra points are for the integration concept, one I think is long overdue.
TextPattern user since 04/04/04
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Re: [wiki] textbook css
Looks great!
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Re: [wiki] textbook css
Very nice look. And integration of all TXP sites – really needed. Its time TXP grew up and put some big clothes on.
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#24 2008-08-18 19:07:18
- candyman
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- From: Italy
- Registered: 2006-08-08
- Posts: 684
Re: [wiki] textbook css
Very good!
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Re: [wiki] textbook css
Thanks for the feedback, all. I’m glad we share sentiments about the integrated presentation of the sites. I’ll go ahead and do a forum mockup too since I have the Fireworks master already. That’s not to suggest I (personally) would take on the actual retooling of the forum skin, but the mockup would be there for anyone wanting it for reference.
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Re: [wiki] textbook css
I stayed home with a sick child yesterday and managed to find enough time to reskin my local copy of MW with the design. I still have some adjustments to make, but then I’ll port it over to a public installment for everyone’s looky-loo.
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Re: [wiki] textbook css
Well I had a few more things to twiggle, and more yet need done, but here’s the demo, a true MW wiki reskinned with the concept. That site won’t stay open indefinitely, but we’ll give it a bit.
I haven’t checked every targeted browser yet (namely modern versions of FF, Opera, Safari and IE, with an additional exception to IE6 for exercise, and Chrome for curiosity).
It works fine in FF and Safari on Mac. There’s a huge bug on Opera that is affecting floated divs which I have not yet figured out. It must be something in the new v.9.5 because Opera has generally worked good for me in the past on floated divs. It works good in Chrome. It’s a little broken in IE7, but that’s an easy fix. I will be a lot broken at the moment in IE6 because I have not yet handled the conditional comment file. Basically I just haven’t addressed IE yet, but will.
Other things to note:
- The “hide/show” link in the table of contents disappeared in the transfer from my Mac to Joyent server. Not sure why but that needs figured out.
- I’ve made it so all wiki editing functions are gone from the interface when a user is not logged in. Keeps the interface cleaner if you’re just reading the wiki.
- The masthead is assumed to be temporary (and I will use it locally anyway); when the final .com concept is realized, the masthead navigation and stuff can be brought into line. The content presentation should be fine no matter what.
I’m not allowing editing at the moment. It’s just for looking at a demo of the initial mockup. Content should be edited in context of the real TextBook location.
Last edited by Destry (2008-09-12 16:03:29)
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Re: [wiki] textbook css
Forgot to mention a couple of things…
First, the language links will appear in the right column under the search as originally conceived. Nothing shows in the demo location because there’s no translation there.
Also, the “title bar” (div containing the “TextBook” title) does not have borders like conceived because of the need for the background color to blend with the active menu item above it (namely, “Docs”). If you add the borders around the title bar and tabs, the top border of the title bar cuts across the menu item tab because it’s later in the flow of markup. A z-index would have to be used on the menu bar, but this can only be done with a position:absolute, which would make it near impossible to position accurately under this particular design (when you take into account center alignments, text resizing and so forth). So, I dropped the borders for now. Interesting note here, this is not a problem on FF or Safari for Mac, which is why I did not catch it before. On Mac, the border does not cut the tab. I have no idea why or how this works, but it’s true, and I’ll add a little screenshot here when I get the chance to prove it.
Last edited by Destry (2008-09-15 08:35:59)
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Re: [wiki] textbook css
Destry mentioned more about his work in progress here so I suggested he was being presumptuous. He replied and my reply to that is here:
I wasn’t baiting anything, just saving you a lot of unnecessary work if you are being presumptuous. You’re right that there were some positive comments in the link you posted. But I do not remember wet saying Mediawiki was the way to go though. As for languages, that’s not a problem.
Anyway, if the community prefers your one huge great and awesome pile of… then that’s fine by me. I will be astonished but I will accept that decision if in fact that is what the community wants.
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Re: [wiki] textbook css
zero wrote:
I do not remember wet saying Mediawiki was the way to go though.
And I would say Dokuwiki is not all that great after experiencing wet’s.
Anyway, if the community prefers your one huge great and awesome pile of… then that’s fine by me. I will be astonished but I will accept that decision if in fact that is what the community wants.
No problem. Same here. If they want your pile, fine by me. Though in my case I am only concerned with what Patrick thinks because he’s the one with the keys and clout. If he’s convinced by the community, that’s a different story, but I don’t see indication of that yet, so I work.
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