Hi folks.
While on holidays last week I had an idea for the software. If you look at most guide books that contain listings, they tend to use icons to briefly show the features of each listing. So a pub guide will have icons that mean food availabile, real ale available, kid friendly, open weekends etc etc.
I think this could be good in the OG software, particularly for search results. Each category could _optionally_ have an icon associated with it (in large and small versions?) that will show up in search results matching nodes that have this category alongside the short description and title. The large version would be used on the node page, the small version on the search results.
Some open issues on this that I haven't thought through to conclusion though.
You'd probably want to restrict this to specific categories, rather than a free-for-all, and some icons would be more important. Perhaps a server-level config setting for which category icons to use? Or a priority ranking of category icons to use, with a maximum number of icons for each node in a results list?
You'd want to be able to quickly scan a list to compare the results for features, so they should show up in the same order regardless of result.
We'd want to be able to keep the icon sizes consistent in some manner, or they'll look really funny.
Finally, this could have some serious performance issues if the icon for each category needs to be looked up in the category node for every result in a search.
Thoughts?
On Mon 25 Aug 2008, Rev Simon Rumble simon@rumble.net wrote:
I think this could be good in the OG software, particularly for search results. Each category could _optionally_ have an icon associated with it (in large and small versions?) that will show up in search results matching nodes that have this category alongside the short description and title. [...] Thoughts?
It might be nice to have icons addable by users, rather than just by the server admin - in the same way as the node images are, already.
It does sound like a complicated project which would take quite a lot of thinking out. But if you want to start working on a preliminary version of it then I certainly have no objections!
Kake
On Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 04:38:20PM +0100, Kake L Pugh wrote:
On Mon 25 Aug 2008, Rev Simon Rumble simon@rumble.net wrote:
I think this could be good in the OG software, particularly for search results. Each category could _optionally_ have an icon associated with it ...
It does sound like a complicated project which would take quite a lot of thinking out. But if you want to start working on a preliminary version of it then I certainly have no objections!
If you want to do it without adding load on the server (apart from that to serve up the images) you could do it with Javascript.
Put the list of categories in a <div> and then do a replace() on the contents while the page renders.
I feel dirty for saying that.
On Tue, Aug 26, 2008 at 6:55 AM, David Cantrell david@cantrell.org.ukwrote:
On Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 04:38:20PM +0100, Kake L Pugh wrote:
On Mon 25 Aug 2008, Rev Simon Rumble simon@rumble.net wrote:
I think this could be good in the OG software, particularly for search results. Each category could _optionally_ have an icon associated with it ...
It does sound like a complicated project which would take quite a lot of thinking out. But if you want to start working on a preliminary version of it then I certainly have no objections!
If you want to do it without adding load on the server (apart from that to serve up the images) you could do it with Javascript.
Put the list of categories in a <div> and then do a replace() on the contents while the page renders.
I feel dirty for saying that.
If you're going that route, CSS hidden property and some JS to alternately show/hide it depending on context.
openguides-dev@lists.openguides.org
-
Chris Prather -
David Cantrell -
Kake L Pugh -
Rev Simon Rumble