On Thu, Jan 26, 2012 at 07:51:57PM +0000, Kake L Pugh wrote:
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.
Easy: done!
http://dev.openguides.org/changeset/1297
- Remove the recent changes display from the front page. It's always full of spam.
Easy: done!
(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,
Ticket created: http://dev.openguides.org/ticket/279
and (b) creating a custom_autocreate_content.tt template something like this: http://svn.randomness.org.uk/trunk/london.randomness.org.uk/custom-templates...
Done.
- 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_valu...
*nod*
- 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
http://svn.randomness.org.uk/trunk/london.randomness.org.uk/scripts/locate.c... http://svn.randomness.org.uk/trunk/london.randomness.org.uk/scripts/lib/RGL/...
- or by patching OpenGuides. Here is the code we use on RGL:
Hmm, I'd prefer to see core OpenGuides updated for this. When you say smoother, do you mean the coding process or the user experience?
It seems like only yesterday we upgraded to v2...
Ticket created, anyway: http://dev.openguides.org/ticket/278
- 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
Done.
- Add more categories to the sidebar (see the Cambridge Guide link for an example).
Oh, good idea.
Added ticket: http://dev.openguides.org/ticket/280
I'm sorry I won't be able to do much more on this at the moment; OpenGuides has fallen way down my list of priorities, unfortunately.
Dominic.