Where are we now?

Just had a week off work. Some people use the word ‘holiday’, my wife prefers the term ‘time to catch up on some DIY’. However you’d be surprised the amount of abstract thought you can achieve while glossing doors, it’s a bit Zen, sort of like ‘The Karate Kid’.

So one of the things I decided to do was a where are we up to type post. First thing I think we should take a look at how the interface measures up to some of the original goals, in particular that the Site Building element should be easy to use.

I think (hope?) we’re doing quite well on this point. We have become distracted at points by trying to build around what we can do, rather than what we should do, but we have realised our folly and retracted those elements in favour of simpler more usable controls as shown in this screen shot of the main page creation area.

Click image to see the screen shot (opens in new window).

A quick walk through.

Here you can see the simple table showing the sites pages. Upon creating a new site the table is populated with one page, the Home page as all other content will sit ‘below’ this in the site architecture. As can be seen the editing options for the ‘Home’ page are limited due to it’s crucial position and status.

Edit Page.

This allows the main details for the page to be edited in the ‘Add or Edit Pages’ section (see below).

Edit Content.

This opens the selected page in the Page Editor page (way too many pages there!), where the pages content can be added or edite. This is done via a series of ‘plugin objects’ which can be loaded into the content area of the page. This avoids tying one page to one selected content type, as the page ‘owns’ the content and not the other way around. (The details of this page will be discussed in an upcoming post).

Page Title.

Each page can hold sub-pages to create categories, thus in the site above the ‘Home’ page owns ‘About Us’, ‘Contact Us’ and ‘Content Page’ (not very imaginative page names I know). In turn the ‘Content Page’ owns both of the ‘Inner Page’ pages.

Page Rank.

The page rank columns allow the pages position within the other children of it’s parent (the sibling pages) to change. This will only alter it’s position within the menus of the site and the site map, it does not really reflect any change in the information architecture.

Page Status.

The Page Status column allows pages to be suspended while editing or if they need to be withdrawn from view for a period, as the Page status can be either ‘live’ or ’suspended’.

Page Delete.

The page delete does just that, but I would like to use Aza Raskins ideas on deleting items from his article in A List Apart. Basically he says don’t issue warning as people learn to ignore them, give people an ‘undo’ option instead.

Add or Edit Pages.

This is pre-filled by with the page details by clicking the Edit Page link and allows the main page details to be changed. If the new page link was clicked (not shown on screen shot) the the details are as in the screen shot and can be changed to suit the page.

As can be seen each page needs a title, a parent page to position it within the site architecture, a status (live or suspended) and a page type. The page type will allow the user to select from a choice of typical page types found on a website. These would be:

• Content page… the typical page type for most pages, this would contain mostly content and only limited navigation, it is a ‘destination’ page.
• Category Index page… used as a ‘home’ page for a category and so would tend to be more like a home page in layout but with a subset of navigational elements. So it would be a mix of teaser items and navigational elements. The site Home page will use this template as well.

Are we measuring up?

Mostly I think we are keeping to the goals we set. In the Page Creator part of the project we are mostly worried about goal 1: Easy to use and goal 4: Flexible. The area I am worried about on this page is the difference between ‘Edit Page’ and ‘Edit Content’, I think we need to make the difference of those two actions more intuitive, perhaps the ‘Edit Content’ link should operate from the page title, as the Page Editor opens up a copy of the page itself, so this may feel more natural.

As far as flexibility goes, I’m pretty happy at the level of interaction available now. We must remember that this is for creating simple sites, not large multi-user corporate behemoths, and so simplicity will give greater reward than advanced flexibility. The flexibility available to change the site architecture, labelling and menus will provide 90% of what users will require, the other 10% is probably not worth introducing at the cost of scaring of a large portion of the user base.

Next is to finish implementing the xStandard platform, in particular the spell checking and image uploading. Then we can move on to the contact form plugin.