Hi Jonathan,
On Sat, May 12, 2012 at 1:33 PM, Jonathan Solichin <jssolichin(a)gmail.com>wrote;wrote:
Hello friends,
First thank you for the inputs.
About the tentative time-line, please confront
each step with a date.
I'm not sure whether it was unclear or not, but the numbers represents the
weeks of GSOC and are not arbritrary. Unless you want the exact date, then
I can go ahead and revise it again. I also appended to the beginning: a
design exploration stage as per your request. [1]
Yes, it was not clear at all :) An improvement would be instead of having
just the numbers to put 'Week x.x:' in your timeline.
About the mock-ups, personally I would prefer we
make it a complete
> initial phase of the project, to take the time to create a skin
> afresh, trying as much as possible to forget about what has been done
> in colibri (the current default skin of XWiki) and instead think
> outside the box. This would mean forgetting about how menus, links,
> information etc. is displayed, and come up with an actual new skin.
> Especially since I understand you have design skills ;)
Thank you. Right, ok so I wasn't sure how much creativity i am allowed with
the skin and that's why my first mock up is pretty close to colibri. I
created a second mock up of a more "brave" skin. desktop [2], mobile [3],
What does the community think? wrong or right direction?
The desktop mockup is interesting. I like the left 'application' navigation
(Quick Links positioning) . Also the Wiki>Space>Page navigation is real
nice and the way you represented the menu-submenu entries (Export and More).
The main problem with this proposal is that you don't consider and maybe
you are not aware of XWiki's states and that the content in a wiki is
mostly dynamic:
- logged-in vs. logged-out content: The menus have many entries and the way
you represented them does not scale. Check out the menus structure
http://incubator.myxwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Improvements/ActionMenuProposal…
was the initial proposal, but some menu entries have changed since
then, but the mockups are ok to give you the impression of the entries).
- empty vs. populated entries: This concerns 'Tags' and 'Comments'
section.
You're put 'Tags' and the 'Welcome' message on the same level because
they
both have 3 rows of content, but this is not the case when 'Tags' are used
and populated (you will not have this consistency any more). When you are
logged-in, the 'Comments' section has another structure and would be
interesting to see how you want to display a comment too. Also you've
removed the 'Activity Stream' which is an important part.
Have a look at
http://incubator.myxwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/WebHomewhich
shows a wiki instance used: there are lots of spaces, lots of
activity entries, some tags, some comments.
- static vs. dynamic content: In a wiki you have 'static' content (content
generated by XWiki: like labels, instructions, buttons, etc. This is static
because can't be changed by user, but still keep in mind that XWiki can be
internationalized, so the dimension is still kind of dynamic) and 'dynamic'
content (content generated by user: titles, text, images, comments, tags,
etc.). Right now in your mockup you assume that some design elements are
gonna have the same dimension and this is not true. And the most striking
case is the page title: 'Web Home'. On other pages different than the
space's WebHomes, that title can be as long as the user wants: 'Responsive
Skin', etc.
Scalability is important when doing a proposal, especially in the
Responsive area, where the layout needs to be flexible also for multiple
devices.
I would love to see some fresh ideas of how the
responsive skin would
look
like.
Jonathan should provide some a timeline in order to see how expensive
this
phase would be.
Ok so at the moment, I am aiming for a week of design exploration. But to
be honest, I have never worked on a project like this, or created a time
line. If someone could comment on my timeline [1] as to whether it is
totally skewed or just about right, that would be great.
Please also take a look at other ideas/layouts for the mobile skin
This is a great resource. I will definitely look into this more deeply.
Thank you!
On a non Responsive Skin topic, is there a place where I can read/reply to
the mailing list, beside email, that is more dedicated (like how google
groups have an online "viewer")?
There is a Forum view of the mails
http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Community/Forum but I don't find it
very useful. Alternatives to see the mailinglists:
http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Community/MailingLists#HForums
Like the way links are delineated at the
bottom as footnotes, does everyone do that manually, or is there a
dedicated place that does this for you?
This is done manually. Some users like to have all the links at the bottom,
some (like me) put them in the context.
It is a little bit confusing to
read emails with multi-level quotes. Or maybe I am just not used to it.
I guess you will have to get use to it :) The quotes are great for context
in order to know what was said before this and keep all the content inside
one mail and not needing to search it in other threads.
Thanks,
Caty