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 At the same time, I wanted to bring it closer to the (soon to be outdated) Textpattern brand.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.

Bloke · 2009-11-23 11:24:19

Hi Dave, had no idea you were working on this. Alicson didn’t mention it as far as I recall when we set up the project group to move txp.org forward. While I welcome the direction and the decluttering, I’d echo the sentiments of Gocom, jakob and Destry above. Particularly:

the usability of list pages (love the ‘by this author’ sidebar, btw: that was something we had planned. But I would welcome the ‘related’ or ‘plugins like this’ list, especially when a plugin is orphaned or outdated and you want a similar plugin that works) and using comments for author use only, perhaps to indicate updates or something… not sure, might get confusing, and needs more thought. See later in this post…
the links to other sites in the family in the masthead so that someone who finds themself on .org can easily jump between textbook, txptips, textgarden, txp.com, etc.
trying to keep to the new ‘brand’ (loose terminology here, as Destry mentioned!). A unified header might have been nice across the board of sites, but as that’s not going to happen a hint of the flavour of the new one (look at textgarden.org) would probably be enough, as Destry intends for the wiki

From my own personal standpoint, a few things aren’t addressed by the design:

non-plugin content — tips, mods, themes, tutorials — should not be on the site at all. I’m waiting for a phpMyAdmin login from (a very busy) Alicson so I can begin the process of migrating all non-plugin content off the site. Tips -> TXPTips; Themes -> Textarden ; Tutorials -> Textbook ; and Mods -> erm, ummm, anyone? (I’d hope that the mods are not really that necessary any more and with 4.2.0 out of the stable that a lot of them can just be ditched. Though some might still have value, if they work). The focus of the site is therefore solely plugins and that affects the headings and the main navigation
stuff slated for v3.2 should really be a stock part of the 3.0 redesign, imo. As jakob says, plugin version compatibility and (perhaps) automatic update notifications impact the search and display features of the site — and they both definitely impact the custom fields in use on the site. So at minimum I’d like to spec out how this is going to work to avoid having to re-engineer everything at a later date. I’m all for saving hassle down the line :-)
visitors should be able to specify a version of TXP and have search results only return plugins that are a) designed for that platform, or b) designed for a previous version but proven to work on the chosen version. Whether that is tracked via a cookie or integrated into the search system which should, as jakob mentioned, be pretty core to the site’s functionality is open to debate. I’ve been bouncing ideas around with jakob and a few others on the team about this over the last couple of months while we were waiting for Alicson to have some free time. One thing that might be beneficial — although the implementation needs work — is a way of linking the plugin version with the TXP version. If dds_mega_widget v0.4 was written for TXP 4.0.8, that should be recorded somehow. If you left the plugin at 0.4 (because you’re a busy guy!) and TXP 4.2.0 came out, people might try your plugin on 4.2.0 and find it still works. Some simple way of saying “yup, v0.4 of dds_mega_widget works under 4.2.0 as well” would be incredibly useful info when searching for plugins. This would also be of benefit if someone is thinking of upgrading to the next version of TXP. If they spot that three of their most used plugins are not going to work, they might hold off the upgrade, or contact the author(s) for clarification — or even sponsorship — of an update (that’s where that ‘Donate’ button comes in :-). They could also learn that their chosen must-have plugin has been adopted by someone else or rewritten, or has become part of the core and is no longer required

Regarding #3, our initial — perhaps flawed — thought was to use a rating system to ‘rate’ whether plugin vN.M works with TXP vX.Y.Z. Sure, some people would say “doesn’t work” but others might say “it so totally does” and over time the number of Yes votes would outweigh the No votes. If there was a commenting system alongside the voting, that would actually add benefit because someone might say “well, it doesn’t work but if you change line 305 to this… then it will work”. That sort of info gets lost in the forum threads.

I guess what I’m inferring is also using txp.org as a confidence indicator that a plugin will be fine. A definite Yes if an author writes it for a specific version or a ‘more likely than not’ under future versions based on community feedback. As it stands, you install and hope. I’d like to txp.org v3 to significantly reduce the ‘hope’ bit :-D

Though I’m not directly involved in the redesign effort (because I suck at the front end of web sites) I will be relocating the old content to new homes and perhaps jumping in every now and again for coding work. Gocom and variaas were primarily going to be looking at that side of things, while jstubbs, jakob and maniqui were going to be doing the actual design / implementation stuff under Alicson’s gaze — when she had a chance to grant them access to the site. With you now in the mix, especially with your busy workload, you might wanna get in touch with the others directly and pool resources on this one so the site can be remodelled at a faster pace. We have a project space set up for discussions (Jonathan’s the admin).

I’ve been out of the loop the last few weeks but should be back on track now if you want to kick things around a bit on the project site, with periodic drops on this thread for wider discussion.

Last edited by Bloke (2009-11-23 11:29:28)

nemoorange · 2009-11-23 12:06:06

Hi Stef. Alicson did mention that a group was trying to form. Alas I wasn’t aware that group actually did form. I didn’t mean to step on any toes here. I’ll get in touch with Johnathan to see where I can fit in with the group.

Bloke · 2009-11-23 12:15:05

nemoorange wrote:

I didn’t mean to step on any toes here.

No toes stepped on, Sir! Love your work, and it’s great that Alicson got a login to you to play in. We’ve all been a bit busy this last month so stuff was slow anyway. Your design genius has arrived at exactly the right moment because some of the things you’ve done we hadn’t considered… and they’re grrrrr-eeaaat :-)

Last I heard, Alicson was in the process of setting up a TXP 4.2.0 space where we could begin to play with stuff for real — somewhere away from the Live site. So please climb aboard the txp.org v3 train, as it’s leaving the station. Toot toot :-)

Last edited by Bloke (2009-11-23 12:16:42)

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