openguides-oxford May 2012

openguides-oxford@lists.openguides.org

1 discussions

Usability/user-friendliness improvements

by Kake L Pugh

As promised in my other mail, here are some suggestions for improving the user-friendliness of the Oxford Guide. They're not in any particular order. I do have some other ideas stemming from a very useful conversation with Janet, but they are a bit more complicated and I haven't finished thinking them through (perhaps we could discuss them in March). - Make "The Oxford Guide" in the banner be a link to the home page. This is how people expect websites to work these days and it keeps tripping me up. - Remove the recent changes display from the front page. It's always full of spam. (Alternatively, but harder, patch OpenGuides so unmoderated changes don't show up in this list.) - Switch from this style of locale/category page: http://oxford.openguides.org/wiki/?id=Locale_Central&version=1 to this: http://oxford.openguides.org/wiki/?id=Locale_Central&version=2 This would involve (a) editing existing pages, and (b) creating a custom_autocreate_content.tt template something like this: http://svn.randomness.org.uk/trunk/london.randomness.org.uk/custom-template… - Once the above has been done, switch the front page links to point to the category/locale pages proper, e.g. http://oxford.openguides.org/wiki/?Locale_Central instead of http://oxford.openguides.org/wiki/?action=index;index_type=locale;index_val… - Switch to the most recent version of the Google Maps API. Version 3 of the API is much smoother and also optimised for mobile browsing. This could be done either with an external script - see for example http://london.randomness.org.uk/scripts/locate.cgi?loc=SE1;map=1 - or by patching OpenGuides. Here is the code we use on RGL: http://svn.randomness.org.uk/trunk/london.randomness.org.uk/scripts/locate.… http://svn.randomness.org.uk/trunk/london.randomness.org.uk/scripts/lib/RGL… - Edit the stylesheet so node images float to the right; compare http://oxford.openguides.org/wiki/?id=Category_Chinese_Food&version=3 with http://cambridge.openguides.org/wiki/?id=Category_Chinese_Food&version=4 - Add more categories to the sidebar (see the Cambridge Guide link for an example). (BTW, please don't just respond with "JFDI". It really is a very disheartening thing to hear. For most of these things, if I had the time and brain space to do them then I would already have done them. However, I would be extremely happy to advise and assist anyone who is keen to take charge of rolling the scripts I've written for RGL into OpenGuides core.) Kake _______________________________________________ openguides-oxford mailing list openguides-oxford(a)lists.urchin.earth.li http://urchin.earth.li/mailman/listinfo/openguides-oxford

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openguides-oxford May 2012