Textpattern.org v3.0 project

nemoorange · 2009-11-21 22:03:04

About a month ago Alicson contacted me asking if I would be able to add my alternate CSS to Textpattern.org. Her request coincided with a class project I’ve been working on. I agreed and upped the ante by offering a broader redesign to the entire site. In addition to laying a new visual look on the site, I felt this was a good opportunity to finally address some of the issues with Textpattern.org (see previous threads 1, 2, & 3). Alicson has been kind enough to ‘promote’ me to Managing Editor on the back end, so I’ll have the privileges to get the job the done.

But before all that happens, I wanted to bring everyone in to the conversation.

So far, I have created a demo site to exhibit what I see as Textpattern.org v3. This is not a fully functioning site, but you can still click around and get a relatively good proximation of what the redesign would be.

The Older Resources haven’t been built out, but you can imagine they’ll look similar to Plugins List & article pages. Don’t pay too much attention to the Help content, as I’d like to revise this for the redesign.

Big Changes

Hiding all non-Plugin article content. Articles from Mods, Tutorials, Tips, and Templates will still exist, but underneath ‘Older Resources’.
Only Plugin articles will be returned when going through ‘filter’ sections: category pages, tag pages, author archive, date archive.
Adding Featured Plugins. This section is focused on new Textpattern users. As a community we can decide on 10-20 recommended plugins.
Add Recently Updated List More ‘valid’ than Newest plugins, as some of the best plugins get multiple revisions.
Removing ratings.
Combine About and Help sections About-this-site information will be found under Help

Across the board I want to simplify the site. Anything that isn’t essential I’d like to remove.

Visual Design

As this site is more of a functional library, I wanted to keep things minimal. At the same time, I wanted to bring it closer to the (soon to be outdated) Textpattern brand. I have not seen what the new Textpattern.com looks like, so the orange bar is still at the top. Mac users get to see the divine Hoefler Text Black Italic. Windows people get Times New Roman (which is in use over at textgarden ).

Currently, it’s marked up in HTML5. As Camino 2.0 is now out, I think this will be a good move to show how forward-thinking we Textpatrons are.

I haven’t had a chance to tweak the CSS for IE, but rest assure, it’ll look good across browsers when launched.

Something like a roadmap

v3.0
- implement new design
- implement new site architecture. Hiding all non-Plugin articles
v3.1
- upgrade backend to 4.2.0
- remove unnecessary plugins
v3.2 – Add new functionality
- filtering by TXP version
- author pages
- file versioning

First steps

Unfortunately, I cannot estimate a launch date for the Txp.org v3. I don’t have a lot of time to devote to moving this project forward. It’ll basically be a side project that I’ll work on when I have available time.

At this stage I’m interested in hearing others thoughts. What functionality should be included? Another filter to add to the list? Did I forget anything?

Last edited by nemoorange (2009-11-21 22:05:05)

jsoo · 2009-11-21 22:42:50

I think it looks great. That said, I have a couple of quibbles with the look (bearing in mind I am no designer). The search button seems to stick out as not matching somehow. I think it’s both the choice of font and font color that give this impression. And I don’t care for the darker double underline under non-selected submenu items. Can’t say why, just a preference.

Any given plugin seems to show the same date whether listed by “Newest” or “Recently Updated”.

I think a much more compact listing would work better for “Authors”, possibly with each author’s name linking to a separate page showing all that author’s plugins.

The shaded bars on the “Tags” listing are a clever way to indicate how many items.

All in all, great work — thanks.

Gocom · 2009-11-21 23:10:56

Nice design :)

Not sure if Recently Updated or Featured should be there as main items.

For instance it’s impossible to select featured plugins. Will some judge them or will they work on statics? If they work on statics, then featured will become more and more featured when time passes by (look at Firefox addon pages for example, meh). If judge selects most featured, then it’s just an opinion and tells nothing to the end-user (well, if you are mass-seeker, then you will love most featured and fame wars).

Recently updated… How many of us actually updates the site or keeps up with dates. If the automatic repo system comes in place then that might even work, but as it currently is, I’m just seeing people that are lost by just looking at the page that doesn’t tell the reality.

Commenting: forum. Don’t see point in that alternative commenting place which makes double work for plugin authors, especially when ppl comment there, they won’t read the forum posts, leading into multiple same questions. And that’s annoying.

If I were you, I would make stuff like featured, and updates filters instead of main menu items. So I could select a specific section (aka category) and sort those items by featured or update date, or publishing date.

Maybe alternative listing methods could be nice too. Like showing just the name of plugin, allowing the visitor to view more at once.

What I think the design currenlty misses is a huge donate button for devs and it puts too much pressure into the download button. Most of plugin authors want that the user visits their site, allowing them to make some cash or getting attention. And at same time publishing their source code to community.

nemoorange · 2009-11-21 23:39:33

@jsoo Thanks for your input! I see what you mean about the search button. It doesn’t fit visually. I’ll work with that. As for date-filtering not working, it’s a demo site so none of the filters currently work. You can keep on clicking around and only the same 7 plugins will show.

@Gocom All great points.

Featured Plugins. These are community picked. We’ll decide these during the design process. If any new plugin comes along and turns out to be awesome, we can add it to the list. They feature the plugins that new users of Txp would want to start out with. I feel like we can come to a consensus on a group of 10-20 plugins Variety is the name of the game – something visual, something database, something admin, something front end, something complex, something simple. Featured Plugins would obviously gain a lot of attention, but if we pick the right ones, I don’t think that will be an issue.
Recently Updated I’m open to the idea of combining the Newest and Recently Updated list sections to one: “Most Recent.” Destry mentioned how a date filter isn’t too practical. I would advocate that power users are interested in seeing new plugins, or old plugins that have gotten big upgrades.
Disable plugin comments, recommending all comments should be in the forum Awesome idea. I’m sorry I didn’t think of it!
Filters This would be pretty powerful. But considering its implementation would be a little tricky for me to figure it out, would we be okay postponing it until the 3.1 phase? Same thing goes with alternative listing methods.
Donate button Yup. I’ll add it. How do you feel about plugin-author donate buttons? Like they have Wordpress Plugin Library

jakob · 2009-11-22 13:21:27

Dave, nice work there and big improvements in structure and visually. Nice wide format, less busy, better hierarchy. Some comments meant entirely as constructive feedback:

Home page
Compact overview of newest and recently updated in separate lists good idea for the homepage, especially with the excerpt infos. Twin column categories easier to take in too. A couple of comments:

I think much more prominence should go to search as it’s one of if not the most important function of the site. At present search is split between a box (two presently with the google search, confusing imho) and a long list of categories. Ideally more search options would be good. What do you think about a prominent central search pane, perhaps tabbed according to search type, e.g. by name / by category / by tag (here perhaps with auto-suggest box to handle the large number of tags). Additional search filters, e.g. version compatibility, exclude archived… would be useful. But maybe people here prefer the separate category list and search box…
With newest and recently updated on the homepage showing the last 5-10 entries, is there a need, as Jukka intimates, for there to be individual “newest and recently updated” sections that essentially do the same. It’s not as if there are 20 new plugins every day. The feed duplicates this too.

List view
A great improvement, much decluttered and more consistent than at present. Having the excerpt makes it easier to see at a glance what each plugin does. At present textpattern.org has lots of different kinds of list views, some of which lacking essential information and are therefore of limited actual use.

It would be good to include a few more infos such as what version of txp it works with (if known), if archived and so on. The list needs to remain clean, but provide enough to be able to make decisions about which plugin to look at.
As Jukka mentioned, for improved usability one could make the list sortable via drop down and have a view more/view less option like there is on the article pane of the backend. To a certain degree that could make one list view serve multiple purposes that are on the present site split across many different sections. For example, having a sort by “new” and sort by “recently updated” brings back the functions you currently have in separate sections.

Plugin view
Here too much improved overview and consistency and easier to see at a glance. Love the permalink P.

Agree with Jukka about referring to the forum for commenting to avoid duplication and/or two separate information flows. Comments could then perhaps be repurposed, maybe for previous versions/changelog?
It’s very useful to have “possibly related plugins” on this page (not just the author’s other plugins).
If there’s a way of establishing “confirmed to work with” voting (not rating but tried and tested with), that would be most useful to see here.

Author list
I think it’s useful to see the plugins made by a single author (you remember a plugin by xyz, but what was it called?) but I never really understood the purpose of an alphabetical list of all plugins by author.

Tag list
An interesting way to represent tag frequency. At first I didn’t immediately twig that the frequency bar should be read from right to left but that’s just a design thing (foreground/background emphasis). One disadvantage is that as the tag list is very long, it’s less easy to browse at a glance. I guess most people will know what they were looking for and it isn’t easy to find one’s tag in the current sea-of-tags-listing either.

Old information: agree that the information should be streamlined. It could/should be just a plugin repository and the tips and remaining infos could be removed to “how to” or “archived” forum here (if still needed) or to txptips.com where still relevant.

Design

At the same time, I wanted to bring it closer to the (soon to be outdated) Textpattern brand. I have not seen what the new Textpattern.com looks like, so the orange bar is still at the top

You point to the predicament yourself. Stuart more or less let on that the textpattern.com site will be like the new textgarden site which doesn’t exactly yell yellow. Personally, I too find yellow a good identifying characteristic for TXP, though more distinct as a highlight/bar than yellow background. The new projected txp.com design with it’s split top/side navigation, strong prominence to external links and 1/3 2/3 column divide doesn’t immediately lend itself to the very different kinds of information on the different txp sites.

New functionality: there have been some rumblings about storing the plugins themselves on the textpattern.org site along with version number with a view to adding a “check for updates” feature to the txp plugin pane sometime in the future. That would be a big plus for the site but has implications for plugin view and list view and possibly search too.

mrdale · 2009-11-22 18:34:22

Great work, I like it! So much better!

Only two quibbles

not big on the page background
could use a little more white space.

vk · 2009-11-23 00:21:10

@nemoorange : Hi… This is cool…

Destry · 2009-11-23 02:26:38

Wow! So glad to see headway on this site, and very happy that Alicson talked to you, David. Love those school projects, eh? :)

It’s 2h30 a.m. for me so I’m not going to blather on too much about functional details. I think you’ll get plenty of feedback on that already. What I would still like to keep in focus, even if at only 25% opacity, is this idea of a unified Txp brand across the family of sites, and a somewhat consistent navigational scheme to go along with it. But I fear we may have sailed way past that heading long ago.

The problem is a unified look and navigation was never really the viewpoint from the outset, The new .com design never looked beyond .com.

Jakob already pointed you to TextGarden, which is the new Txp design as far as I know now, curiously launched first on TxG. I also agree with the comments about general layout; while it might work OK for .com, it’s much less practical for the other sites, and that’s too bad. It certainly won’t work for the wiki. I’ll be able to adopt presentational aspects, but that 1/3-2/3 layout isn’t going to fly for wiki content. I dare say you’d have a hard time shoehorning it here too, and I’m not convinced it works for TxG either, even if it is at first aesthetically grabbing, simply by being different.

Although I like your design here, and background, you probably want to adopt more of the new design presentation, since that’s the new brand direction. I’m disappointed about the lack of yellow in the new design. It shouldn’t need to be much (and could be something besides the old design’s bar at top), but a few more highlights to retain the Txp trademark color would be smart, in my opinion. There’s just not enough of it in the new design, sadly.

Another thing I would hope to discourage, if you’re even thinking about it at all, is following TxG’s lead and infringing on the new Txp logo. I guess the first question to ask is – what is the new Txp logo, actually? Is it just the hammer and chisel, or is it that plus the name “Textpattern” to the right of it? If it’s the latter, then clearly it’s been corrupted in TxG. The new branding is being hi-jacked before it’s even launched. LOL! Ideally, a site would use the real Txp logo, and include it’s own name (whether TextGarden, TextBook, Support Forum, Plugins, etc) elsewhere in the masthead so not to confuse the identity of the brand, but I think you know what I’m talking about.

The only other stickler from me would be navigation. I don’t see any kind of dominant links to quickly get to Home (.com), Forum, Wiki, Themes. These should be something apart from .org’s specific focus, of course, but still prominent enough to be convenient.

Anyway, I trust you’ll do good no matter. What I’m saying is mainly what I’m keeping in mind for myself when I get to tweaking the wiki soon. I’ll keep the wiki layout more or less like it is but adopt the new presentational changes (with a little more yellow in places). I’ll keep the new Txp logo in tact, with “TextBook” pretty much where it is. Navigation won’t change much (or at all) as it’s the closest thing to what I’ve envisioned all along.

Oh, your fonts do seem a bit small. On my mac I can barely read the little gray elven characters in the upper right.

Otherwise, great, great great start, Mr. Managing Editor. :)

mrdale · 2009-11-23 03:18:57

OK, I’m going on record.

I HATE the carver guy. it’s a weak logo for a whole host of reasons. Some visual, some topical, some philosophical. The hammer and chisel is light years stronger. Not that I really care or anything.

I mean seriously, look at the thing, it’s hideous.

So a semi-naked man is wailing on the side of a book with a hammer. Textpattern is a CMS for heaven’s sake. Not an organization for making permanent engravings in stone. What about this even fits with a lightweight-flexible system? We’re carving pixels in books I guess.

Last edited by mrdale (2009-11-23 03:28:52)

mwr · 2009-11-23 03:36:57

Looks great. Let’s go for it.

wet · 2009-11-23 05:27:00

mrdale wrote:

I HATE the carver guy.

FYI.

Destry · 2009-11-23 09:17:21

mrdale wrote:

OK, I’m going on record. I HATE the carver guy.

I’m pretty sure you were already on record with that point elsewhere in the forum, Dale. :) But I’m curious, what inspired that affirmation here?

On a different note, dear readers,I would like to clarify my comments about TxG’s “borrowing” of the new logo. I certainly wasn’t coming down on Stuart. After all, the new design doesn’t allow much leeway for adding two identities (a parent and child) so combining identities might have seemed like a clever way out. But from a brand management point of view, it’s a bad idea, and you certainly wouldn’t see this kind of thing anywhere else, at least not if the brand managers knew what bombs to avoid.

UX Crank’s latest article is quite good, Be Russian. I suspect the software development principles there apply equally well to web designs. Put the design out there (finally) and improve it once the users/community shows where it’s wrong.

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#1 2009-11-21 22:03:04