Working on 2.0: Developer sprint

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Timbalu
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Re: Working on 2.0: Developer sprint

Post by Timbalu »

How about switching to a font icon set...? This could help us in many ways.
I like these ones
There is the well designed bootstrap one: http://fortawesome.github.com/Font-Awesome/
Or even the GitGub Octicons font face itself: https://github.com/styleguide/css/7.0
and many more outside... e.g http://fontello.com/
But even the jQuery Mobile Icon Pack now includes the Font Awesome icons.
Regards,
Ian

Serendipity Styx Edition and additional_plugins @ https://ophian.github.io/ @ https://github.com/ophian
yellowled
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Re: Working on 2.0: Developer sprint

Post by yellowled »

As of now, I'm actually trying for an icon-free backend. That will probably not work, in which case I'd definitely want to go with an icon-font. It just scales way better.

I'll most likely use Fontello for that, so it might be Entypo or Font Awesome. The problem with Font Awesome is that it comes from Twitter, which makes any site always look a bit like Twitter, at least to the trained eye. Entypo also has a few more icons and is actively maintained. But in the end, the deciding factor will be which icons we actually need and which set offers them (I'm not a fan of mixing icon-fonts).

Good news is I'll probably have a lot of time over the weekend, so maybe I'll come up with a more refined backend design.

YL
Don Chambers
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Re: Working on 2.0: Developer sprint

Post by Don Chambers »

I am not a fan of an icon-free backend... I find icons to be very informative.... much better than words alone. One set of icons that I would love to use is icomoon. I might even be willing to pay for it myself if the copyright holder has no objection to us using them in s9y. I am however, looking for a very simple login page... here is what I have as of right now using mostly css from 2k11:

Image

Thoughts?

I am still mocking up design ideas in photoshop for the actual admin interface. Something I would like to have is a currpage variable. Problem I am running into is the additional "stuff" that a url could have. For instance, if I select "manage styles", the url is initially "http://www.domain.com/serendipity_admin ... =templates". If I select a different template, I get something like this: "http://www.domain/serendipity_admin.php ... heme]=2k11" - the difference being "&serendipity[adminAction]=install&serendipity[theme]=2k11" being appended to the initial url.

If I use a template with options, then save those options, the url changes to "http://www.sitethreetest.com/serendipity_admin.php", which is used for a lot of things, including the admin frontpage. Any suggestions?
=Don=
yellowled
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Re: Working on 2.0: Developer sprint

Post by yellowled »

Don Chambers wrote:One set of icons that I would love to use is icomoon.
It has a CC license (with a limited set of icons included) and an icon font available. Might be an option.
Don Chambers wrote:Thoughts?
Looks very Wordpress-y. :) My current take on the login page looks very similar, but doesn't use the 2k11 color scheme but a s9y color scheme.

I am, however, pretty confident that we can actually get this to be responsive, which would be great since it's very unlikely we'll ever have a mobile s9y app, at least not for all mobile OSes. Whether it will actually be usable on mobile devices is a different question, especially in some areas of the backend like the media db etc.
Don Chambers wrote:If I use a template with options, then save those options, the url changes to "http://www.sitethreetest.com/serendipity_admin.php", which is used for a lot of things, including the admin frontpage. Any suggestions?
Not sure I get what you mean, but you could just emit/use specific ids for that (which is what I'm doing in quite a few places).

YL
Don Chambers
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Re: Working on 2.0: Developer sprint

Post by Don Chambers »

yellowled wrote:Looks very Wordpress-y. :) My current take on the login page looks very similar, but doesn't use the 2k11 color scheme but a s9y color scheme.
I'm not at all concerned with whether it looks like that other blog engine... simply google "login form design" and most all the good designs are extremely brief: login name, password, a "remember me" checkbox, and a button. I've wanted that for years. I do not want the entire banner normally emitted in the admin suite, nor s9y & php versions on the login form. And while I see you are using colors that we have seen on all the s9y sites, I am trying to stay away from those since this was to be something completely new and fresh.
yellowled wrote:
Don Chambers wrote:If I use a template with options, then save those options, the url changes to "http://www.sitethreetest.com/serendipity_admin.php", which is used for a lot of things, including the admin frontpage. Any suggestions?
Not sure I get what you mean, but you could just emit/use specific ids for that (which is what I'm doing in quite a few places).

YL
What I meant is that I cannot uniquely identify all the admin pages by a predictable url... There is no single url for "manage styles"... it changes depending on what you are doing.
=Don=
Timbalu
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Re: Working on 2.0: Developer sprint

Post by Timbalu »

yellowled wrote:
Don Chambers wrote:One set of icons that I would love to use is icomoon.
It has a CC license (with a limited set of icons included) and an icon font available. Might be an option.
Very nice also!!
Just to keep in mind, we should think of all plugins that do have the need for using icons, so we have to pick up some more eventually.
Regards,
Ian

Serendipity Styx Edition and additional_plugins @ https://ophian.github.io/ @ https://github.com/ophian
yellowled
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Re: Working on 2.0: Developer sprint

Post by yellowled »

Don Chambers wrote:most all the good designs are extremely brief
I know. That's why my take looks just the same right now. :)
Don Chambers wrote:I do not want the entire banner normally emitted in the admin suite, nor s9y & php versions on the login form.
While I second that from a design standpoint, it does have its benefits to emit the versions there. If somebody states his blog url in the forum, but omits the versions, we always have a quick way to look them up. I'm not saying this should be a deciding factor, it's just something to consider.
Don Chambers wrote:And while I see you are using colors that we have seen on all the s9y sites, I am trying to stay away from those since this was to be something completely new and fresh.
It was actually a bad idea to pick the s9y colors. I just used them for the podcast blog (where they totally made sense), so now it's kind of a yawn to work with them again.
Don Chambers wrote:What I meant is that I cannot uniquely identify all the admin pages by a predictable url... There is no single url for "manage styles"... it changes depending on what you are doing.
Of course, but now that (almost) all of the backend is smartified, you'll be able to have individual markup for those pages (actually, “just” for their content). Are you saying you would need i.e. an id for the body or something? What for?
Timbalu wrote:Just to keep in mind, we should think of all plugins that do have the need for using icons, so we have to pick up some more eventually.
I am aware of that, which is why (of all the icon fonts on fontello.com) Font Awesome probably is the better choice since it offers more “interface” icons.

I am still developing this in a “vanilla” 2.0 backend without any additional plugins installed, but that will of course come into play later. It's actually one of the factors why I think this is going to be much, MUCH more work than we anticipate right now. :)

YL
Don Chambers
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Re: Working on 2.0: Developer sprint

Post by Don Chambers »

yellowled wrote:
Don Chambers wrote:I do not want the entire banner normally emitted in the admin suite, nor s9y & php versions on the login form.
While I second that from a design standpoint, it does have its benefits to emit the versions there. If somebody states his blog url in the forum, but omits the versions, we always have a quick way to look them up. I'm not saying this should be a deciding factor, it's just something to consider.
We can see the s9y version by viewing the page source.
yellowled wrote:
Don Chambers wrote:What I meant is that I cannot uniquely identify all the admin pages by a predictable url... There is no single url for "manage styles"... it changes depending on what you are doing.
Of course, but now that (almost) all of the backend is smartified, you'll be able to have individual markup for those pages (actually, “just” for their content). Are you saying you would need i.e. an id for the body or something? What for?
In the simplest form, lets say I want these admin links (ie, new entry, edit entries, comments, configuration, media library, etc) to be buttons. And lets further say that I want to change the button appearance when it has been selected. I click on "Manage styles", and the url changes to "http://www.domain.com/serendipity_admin ... =templates". That's great, so in my smarty template I have something like {if $currpage="http://www.domain.com/serendipity_admin ... s_selected", and via css I change the appearance of that button.

Numerous problems exist because, if I select a different template, the current url changes based on the selected template, such as "http://www.domain.com/serendipity_admin ... heme]=2k11"... and now my conditional test for the templates page no longer works. If you select a template with options and save those options, the page refreshes to "http://www.domain.com/serendipity_admin.php", even though the page is still what we would mostly see by selecting "manage styles". See the problem?

Not sure if you caught it yet, but I see that one of your recent commits seems to have overwritten the frontend entries.tpl with your admin version in 2k11.
=Don=
yellowled
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Re: Working on 2.0: Developer sprint

Post by yellowled »

Don Chambers wrote:We can see the s9y version by viewing the page source.
If the template chooses to emit it, yes. (I'm not saying we have to emit those, they could actually be confusing for non-technical users, and they don't provide any information we might need anyway. Just wanted to point out that it has its benefits as well.)
Don Chambers wrote:And lets further say that I want to change the button appearance when it has been selected.
That could be done with a currpage indicator. I'm just not sure we actually need that kind of indicator, it really depends on the way the whole navigation concept ends up. I'm not entirely sure our current navigation concept is the best solution in terms of usability. Try not to think of the new backend as the old one with a new style necessarily. It could still turn out to be a whole new concept in terms of how to interact with it.
Don Chambers wrote:Not sure if you caught it yet, but I see that one of your recent commits seems to have overwritten the frontend entries.tpl with your admin version in 2k11.
I haven't committed to the 2k11 repo in 9 days. The entries.tpl in the s9y-admin-tpl repo is still the same. Can you point me to the commit you're referring to on GitHub?

YL
Don Chambers
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Re: Working on 2.0: Developer sprint

Post by Don Chambers »

I'm not sure if we need the currpage concept or not - would just like to have it as an option. At the moment, we cannot, because any one page's url might have additional modifiers appended to it due to the selected action and therefore be unpredictable in a template logical test. In general terms, I would like to see as much flexibility built in as possible, allowing for any number of admin templates.

Disregard what I said about entries.tpl.
=Don=
Timbalu
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Re: Working on 2.0: Developer sprint

Post by Timbalu »

Timbalu wrote:
Don Chambers wrote:One set of icons that I would love to use is icomoon.
Very nice also!!
Just to add another very nice one used by bootstrap, linking origin to http://glyphicons.com/
Regards,
Ian

Serendipity Styx Edition and additional_plugins @ https://ophian.github.io/ @ https://github.com/ophian
yellowled
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Re: Working on 2.0: Developer sprint

Post by yellowled »

Don Chambers wrote:In general terms, I would like to see as much flexibility built in as possible, allowing for any number of admin templates.
That's definitely true. However, if the currpage functionality is feasiible is a question for the coders. :)
Timbalu wrote:Just to add another very nice one used by bootstrap, linking origin to http://glyphicons.com/
I'm not a fan of Bootstrap, but that's a different discussion. The problem with Glyphicons is that the free license does not offer an icon font. Personally, I don't think it's that different from Font Awesome (which was used in Bootstrap before) to justify the price for the royalty-free license.

YL
onli
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Re: Working on 2.0: Developer sprint

Post by onli »

yellowled wrote:
Don Chambers wrote:In general terms, I would like to see as much flexibility built in as possible, allowing for any number of admin templates.
That's definitely true. However, if the currpage functionality is feasiible is a question for the coders. :
It is. And we already have something like that in the backend to set the <title>.
yellowled
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Re: Working on 2.0: Developer sprint

Post by yellowled »

onli wrote:And we already have something like that in the backend to set the <title>.
Unfortunately, {$admin_vars.title} is not unique. I.e. it says “Entries” for both “New entry” and “Edit entries”.

YL
onli
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Re: Working on 2.0: Developer sprint

Post by onli »

True, but that should be possible to change.

Two more points for the next sprints:
1. Backend-related: I just lost an article I wrote for one and a half hour because of the damned timeout on preview. We should save the editor-content via localStorage automatically, or extend the plugin accordingly and activate it by default. And disable the timeout if possible (probably a php-setting though)
2. In the core, there is quite a lot of calendar-related code no one seems to use anymore. I'd like to remove all of it.
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