Antville Project

RFC: new organisation of site navigation

This is a proposal for restructuring the way Antville handles site navigation, i.e. displaying links within a weblog for various groups of users. Here is a list of proposed changes:

  1. Leave the current weblog.navigation macro as is to avoid breaking current antville.org weblogs.
  2. Directly embed navigation elements that are the same for all users into the main page skin.
  3. Create a new macro called "weblog.adminlinks" that only display links for contributors and admins. Points 2. and 3. solve two problems:
    • it makes it possible to separate basic site navigation from navigation links displayed only for contributors and administrators
    • it makes basic site navigation easier to customize
  4. Replace the "search" link with an embedded search field (already discussed and agreed upon here)
  5. Replace the "topics" link with a macro that displays an inlined list of all topics (imagine, no more links to empty topics page, and new topics would automagically appear in sidebar!)
  6. Move the "polls" link to the links only displayed for contributors and admins. The reason for this is that I consider polls to be building blocks similar to images and goodies which would be displayed to ordinary users only when linked or embedded from a story or comment or skin.

Thus, the site navigation code that would be directly embedded into the main page skin would look something like this (in pseudo-macro-code, so to say):

<% weblog.link to="main" text="home" %><br />
<% weblog.topiclist %><br />
<!-- insert more static links here if you want -->
<% weblog.adminlinks %><br />

<!-- um, maybe we should write a macro 
for the search box? --> <form action="<%this.url%>search"><input name="q" value="<% request.q encoding="form" %>"><input type="submit" value="search"></form>

comment    

 
hns, June 12, 2002 at 11:43:56 AM CEST

Thinking...

Or what about the following Pseudo-Menu:

Home

Themen:
   Fischen
   Spazieren
   Angeln
   Jagen
   Rasenmähen

Archiv:
   Februar 2002
   März 2002
   April 2002

Suche: 
   [_________]

Manage:
   Neue Story
   Stories
   Bilder
   Polls
   Files
   Skins
   Mitglieder
   Settings

that would be generated by the following pseudo-code:

<% weblog.link to="main" text="Home" %><br />

<% weblog.topiclist prefix="Themen:" %><br />

<% weblog.monthlist prefix="Archiv:" %><br />

<% weblog.searchbox prefix="Suche:" %><br />

<% weblog.adminlinks prefix="Manage:" %><br />

Of course the real code would be more convoluted and less beautiful, but you get the idea...

link  

 
robert, June 12, 2002 at 12:55:10 PM CEST

good ideas

basically +1 for all of that. but instead of one macro "weblog.adminlinks" we should use two separate macros (weblog.contributorlinks & weblog.adminlinks), otherwise it's impossible to display them separately on a page (they should use the existing skins contribnavigation and adminnavigation as usual). or even better: why not change the existing weblog.navigation-macro to something like this: <% weblog.navigation for="admins|contributors" %> (avoiding the attribute "for" would mean that antville would render both skins if the user is admin). this should also be backwards-compatible (or did i miss something?)

link  

 
hns, June 12, 2002 at 1:51:43 PM CEST

right

If we want to keep the links for contributors and admins separate then we definitely should do it with extra attributes to the existing navigation macro. I didn't think of this when I wrote the RFC (but I recall now that this was the solution we came up with last time we talked about it ;-)

link  


... comment
 
tobi, June 12, 2002 at 1:55:04 PM CEST

well, i am definitely +1 for all of what has been written here. but wouldn't it be nice for all of us if somebody would post here a short summary of what hns and robert have been talking about to share your plans and remain open source?

link  

 
robert, June 12, 2002 at 2:51:23 PM CEST

yep

of course - sorry for not doing it asap, i'll try to do it today. UPDATE: it's here.

link  


... comment


The Antville Server Fund has been a great success. Thanks to everybody who contributed!
online for 8308 Days
last updated: 1/4/11, 10:22 AM
status
Youre not logged in ... Login
menu
March 2024
SunMonTueWedThuFriSat
12
3456789
10111213141516
17181920212223
24252627282930
31
July
recent
zfuture's house here is zfuture's
house
by zfuture (7/31/03, 2:59 AM)
i understand your concerns however,
i hardly can think of a solution. certainly, if the...
by tobi (7/29/03, 9:47 AM)
Found several more similar sites
listed This is getting to be quite a concern to...
by cobalt123 (7/27/03, 7:56 PM)
Second Post Alert on Referrer
bug livecatz I put this into "help" and now here:...
by cobalt123 (7/26/03, 7:14 PM)
well it's not easy to
find from here, anyway. think we should include a link,...
by tobi (7/24/03, 11:25 AM)
So finally I found
the helma Bugzilla - stupid me.
by mdornseif (7/24/03, 10:28 AM)
clock not that it's particularly
earthshattering but the antclock is running slow by about 15...
by kohlehydrat (7/23/03, 8:25 PM)
but blogosphere.us isn't can't really
be rated as spam can it?
by kohlehydrat (7/23/03, 8:08 PM)
More referrer spam www.webfrost.com
by Irene (7/23/03, 7:55 PM)
How to log skin names
I accessed to console?? Hi, I would like to know...
by winson (7/23/03, 4:12 PM)

Click here to get an XML version of this weblog.

Made with Antville
powered by
Helma Object Publisher