[wiki] Wiki Progression

jstubbs · 2010-11-10 04:03:46

Hi Destry,

Personally I agree with you about a common masthead and it would have been a good idea to have addressed this when the TXP homepage was re-designed. However, before making any advances to a common masthead, it may be appropriate to seek permission/approval from the designer of the page (squaredeye) since any changes would affect their design.

Of course it may depend if there was an agreement on the design, but at a minimum the courtesy should be respected.

While working recently on the new txp.org page, there was a feeling of restriction given the main nav structure and two column layout of .com, so a common masthead would be welcome.

els · 2010-11-10 08:24:13

Destry

Great write-up, I like your ideas very much.

Jonathan

Seeking squaredeyes permission/approval – if appropriate at all – is skipping a couple of steps in my opinion. First thing needed is consent about Destry’s proposal. Sure we don’t need permission to think about this? I agree of course about the courtesy thing, but I guess we can leave that to those in charge of the .com site, if and when these ideas have taken shape.

Destry · 2010-11-10 12:53:42

jstubbs,

Thanks for kicking in. I hear you about courtesy, and I’m very conscientious about Matthieu in all this. (And he’s welcome to pipe in here, if so inclined.)

First, we have to remember that his templates were designed for .com alone, not any other site. You seem to agree to what I’ve been saying since the redesign happened; too bad a common masthead wasn’t taken more seriously back in the day. (But that was the horse committee’s fault, not Matthieu’s.)

In any case, I’m not suggesting that .com changes its design/layout, or even colors for that matter. The only thing I’m pointing out for .com, really, are content tweaks (links, mainly), and that’s not Squaredeye’s call, so asking his permission isn’t really relevant, as Els recognizes. It’s likely Robert who makes the call about content, and as I alluded to in the beginning of my previous post, he may care or not and that’s fine. It’s the other sites that really stand to gain (but .com too if it played along).

To be clear, the common masthead design changes that I’ve been showing here are meant for the other sites, not .com. Textpattern.com should keep it’s current design, with the constraining left column aligned with the logo, etc. That also means the masthead for the Blog. But I’m presuming the Forum is a different story even though it’s sitting on that domain, or it would have already been designed differently. Clearly those templates aren’t a good fit for a bulletin board.

Without a doubt, the masthead I’m proposing for the other sites is a HUGE step closer to alignment with the aesthetic aspects of the “style guide”. Even the layout changes, which are necessary (because of the .com grid that’s centered around the logo), don’t detract from the common feel. More importantly, they improve the global usability.

Anyway, next iteration of the wiki should see something more in this direction, with a few more of the body styles implemented too.

hcgtv · 2010-11-10 16:53:39

Destry wrote:

To be clear, the common masthead design changes that I’ve been showing here are meant for the other sites, not .com.

This reminds me of when the idea of a common navbar was born at Nucleus. Once we got the specifics ironed out, each site included the navbar from a central location atop their sites. That way each site could have their own look, but retain similar navigation.

Once the navbar was in place, getting around was much easier and the users gave it a thumbs up. I’m not proposing a navbar for Textpattern, but common navigational elements between sites does improve the experience for new users.

thebombsite · 2010-11-20 18:52:13

I haven’t been ignoring this thread. Just been a bit too busy to do anything useful about it.

I now have a network navigation bar sitting on Textgarden for you to have a look at. I like the idea of having one of these but I felt that there were 2 things wrong with Destry’s visualisations. The first was that I thought it a little too heavy; the second was that it gets jumbled into the site.

With the exception of the “button” which I’m still not happy with, I think I have a more pleasing solution. Maybe someone with better image manipulation skills can have look at that button.

The navigation is completely separated from the site by the tag line – search block. I’m kind of assuming everyone is going to have one of those. By doing it this way I feel that the actual design of the site itself can be left completely to the wishes and needs of those involved. They don’t have to look like Textpattern or Textgarden (which I am perfectly happy with by the way).

Anyway see what you think. The twitter feed has been removed from both Textpattern and Textgarden already so adding a tag line to replace it is a good idea in my opinion. What those tag lines are to be probably needs some discussion though I have no problem with Destry’s current suggestions. I quite like Robert’s latest contribution. ;)

I am off to eat now so chat amongst yourselves ‘till I get back.

els · 2010-11-22 23:07:20

I like the smaller navigation bar, for me it’s still clear enough on which site I am ;) And I think the more emphasized separation from the site’s header indeed leaves more room for the individual sites’ layouts.
I haven’t thought about how Textbook would look with this, it’s a bit different from Textgarden or the .com site. Destry?

Just one thing: I wouldn’t have said ‘txp forum’, there is only one forum so why not just ‘forum’? (It doesn’t say ‘txp plugins’ or ‘txp docs’ either.)

thebombsite · 2010-11-23 00:04:24

You word is my command ma’am. ;)

datorhaexa · 2010-11-29 14:56:22

I might be picking again at details, but I think that the logo inside “network” doubles badly with the TXP logo on the Templates site. Wouldn’t it be better to just keep “Network” as text + double arrow and leave the logo at its place? Stuart, what do you think?

thebombsite · 2010-11-29 15:10:23

I don’t have a problem with that Ralitza though I did try and keep the network logo small so that it didn’t clash.

The problem will be how the other sites deal with their main logo. The idea here is to have something that can be replicated throughout the network and at this point the design of the navigation hasn’t been finalised nor discussed a heck of a lot. :(

datorhaexa · 2010-11-29 22:49:55

Ok, I see. By “navigation” you mean that uppermost line that would be sort-of intra-sites navigation, I presume? I think I’ve missed the rationale behind bringing the external links up, but I suspect that they are harder to spot bottom-left on the main site. If those are up as a ribbon on top of all, I’d give them a different.. slightly different background to distinguish them from the main internal site navigation. Will try to have make a small mockup tomorrow — pictures are better than words. Hopefully, this will bring more ideas to the table.

thebombsite · 2010-11-29 23:45:57

Yes Ralitza. The navigation at the very top of the page. The idea is to come up with something that can be used on all sites, keeping the same design, but not interfering with the design of the site itself. A bit of a quandary because on the one hand it needs to be visible but on the other hand it shouldn’t over-power the site or make it top-heavy. So keep that in mind when you are designing.

Once we have settled on a design there are other considerations that need to be sorted out. First, the sidebar links on the textpattern.com site can become truly “external”. That is to say they will point to sites outside the network such as TXP Tips, We Love TXP and the book etc.

Second is the clash of having a “Docs” link in both the network navigation and the textpattern.com navigation. I have discussed certain changes with Wet but they rely on all the FAQs being moved over to TextBook where they belong then moving a couple of things around in textpattern.com.

So it’s one of those jobs where two or three things need to happen at roughly the same time. Plus of course both TextBook and the Resources site are currently getting major overhauls.

Timing is everything with this one. Fun, fun, fun. ;)

Bloke · 2010-11-30 00:16:08

Personally, I’d prefer to lose the main nav buttons as they are on .com and textgarden and build them into the flow of the site. For example Destry’s .org mockup (ignore the 3-column design if thats not your thang, just consider the sentiment).

At the moment in the .org redesign we have main nav items similar to the ones on textpattern.com that say things like “Plugin search”, “Plugins by category”, “Plugins by author”, “Featured plugins”, “Login or register” and so on. What I’m considering is to remove those big buttons and use the big-button idea as the masthead to allow you to jump between .org, .com, the wiki, textgarden, the forum, weblog, etc.

Note in the mockup screenie above that the functions that those buttons used to perform have been redistributed in context elsewhere on the page; e.g. put in the sidebar or on the ‘Login’ line, which you can see is echoed on the wiki mockup too. The .com and Textgarden sites don’t necessarily need those lines as login lines but could use them as status info (heck, if we could find the owner of the twitter feed and get it working again, it could go there).

I realise that this is a big change and is far easier for .org and the wiki as we have a potentially clean slate to work on. Not sure how it would fit with Textgarden and .com but I’m sure it could be chiselled into shape somehow. Then, as you say Stuart, the other links about the place become true external links, and the top of the sidebar becomes the navigation jumpoff point.

Once the FAQs are moved to Textbook or some other place (let’s face it, they’re not much use as locked documents, and there are sooooooo many of them, often with outdated info, as to be pretty useless) and the masthead concept is decided, there are even fewer ‘main nav links’ on .com so the ones that are left (pretty much just “Features” and “About”) could probably be redistributed fairly easily to sidebars or even ditched/relegated to the footer (at least the ‘About’ could).

If I could get myself organised I’d go and do something like this on the new .org as a testbed and see if it worked from a workflow perspective. At least with something concrete to demonstrate, we could decide if it was the way to go or not, iron out the kinks and then move things forward a site at a time to a common masthead so it gives a more cohesive view of the TXP universe!

As I mentioned elsewhere today, my helper Elves are galivanting off with Santa to prepare for Christmas so I’m short staffed and don’t have the required skillset to do it myself (well, I do but it’ll take me 16 times longer than someone more versed in CSS and HTML).

Last edited by Bloke (2010-11-30 00:17:11)

maruchan · 2010-11-30 00:41:09

BTW, changing the Search form width to 210px seems to fix the displaced-go-button problem in Chrome.

thebombsite · 2010-11-30 01:18:22

You aren’t really convincing me Stef. :(

We have 2 sites already in existence so whatever we do needs to be delicate. What you think of Textgarden is by the by but the current textpattern.com design is by far the best it has ever been and is well liked by many a visitor and I’m not going to mess it up. As far as the main nav blocks are concerned I only see the possibility of one of them disappearing, Docs, once the FAQ thing has been decided upon. It may well be that it can be replaced or the remaining blocks can simply be widened.

As far as Destry’s mock-ups are concerned they have, in my opinion, certain design flaws.

The first is that the “blue block” is actually a part of the site, containing the search and the tag-line or whatever we decide to put in there, yet it has been separated from the site. It should be below the network nav not above it. When people visit a site they expect the top nav to take them somewhere within the site not somewhere else. I think it will be confusing. You are making the network nav the primary and relegating what should be primary to the sidebar. I don’t think that is good practice.

Second, the network nav does not need a “Blog” entry. It is a primary block on the Textpattern site and there is a link to Textpattern in the network nav. It’s simply doubling up.

The third problem is that neither Textpattern nor Textgarden need that extra “yellowish” bar. TextBook and maybe Resources have a use for it but it has no place on the other 2 sites. That is another reason for moving the network links above the blue line.

The fourth problem is what happened to the logo? I love the logos on textpattern and textgarden and I can’t see why you can’t have logos made up for textbook and resources. What I am seeing in the mock-ups is so disjointed.

Do you get the impression that I don’t like them?

Bloke · 2010-11-30 02:02:07

thebombsite wrote:

You aren’t really convincing me Stef. :(

All fair points. I don’t know the first thing about good design so I don’t really have a leg to stand on.

The search bar/tagline thing being part of the site makes sense. That’s what they do (mostly…) on Joomla Joomla Joomla. If you click around on a lot of the stuff along the top, the masthead stays roughly the same across the top and the search bar is below it. Then, as on Textgarden, they have secondary nav for that particular part of the site underneath. A nice logical flow, as you say.

Perhaps the thing that’s doing my head in is that the .com / textgarden design is so balanced as it is that adding the bar above makes it seem top-heavy. Perhaps there’s something we can do here to retain the big buttons but make the network area less intrusive. I dunno. Clutching at straws, me. EDIT: I see you’ve neatened it up in the latest revision. I’ll shut up; it looks fine.

Oh, and the blog link doesn’t have to be part of the masthead as it’s only relevant to .com. I have no problem with fewer links. You’ve already dropped it and it’s great.

I did actually make a logo for the Resources site in the same vein as the ones on .com/Textgarden. But it looked so similar to the other sites that I got confused which site I was on, like Els!

~~As I say, somewhere there’s a happy medium. Just not sure we’ve quite found it yet.~~ If you’re convinced with the network bar as you have it on Textgarden then I’ll bow to your design expertise and simply steal your code :-)

Errr, so can I steal your code now please?

Last edited by Bloke (2010-11-30 02:08:36)

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Re: [wiki] Wiki Progression

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