making progress on knotes' discussion system usability

22-November-2005

[ kind=progress report , development/knotes/discussion/features ]
We've been quietly making some progress towards upgrading the hard-to-use knotes discussion system into a 'kick-ass', clean but powerful discussion system. We're finally putting some of the pieces together in a testbed area within the National Guidance Research Forum site. Please have a look and tell us what you think.

Have a look at this new testbed in the NGRF site. It's where ourselves and the editorial team from the NGRF are going to be hammering hard at the discussion system issues over the next few days.

Welcome beta testers to a set of new weblogs for the NGRF. During late November 2005 we're using these weblogs to work out a new interface for discussion, and new looks for the weblogs. Please bear with us if you encounter problems using them.

National Guidance Research Forum - New NGRF Weblogs - not public yet

Already there are some important improvements:

member profiles
most of the features needed for basic profiles are working. Names of authors/commenters are links to their profiles in weblog views. This demo includes the display of some more advanced features using static data for display. If you fancy having a go yourself, the template names work in all the sites including the knownet site: $portal_url/Members/my-username/profile to view, $portal_url/profile_edit_form to edit your own (yes, the edit-form needs a bit of guide text and formtting - we'll be adding / changing fields so hav not settled that form yet).
reply from within blog one-entry view
there is a simple comment form directly within the one-entry blog view, with AJAXian log-in formlet for convenience.
better context in the main RSS 2 feed
discussion items in the RSS 2 feed now have a tagline pointing to the item they reply to. The node in the RSS 2 feefd now points to a usable interface (for blog entries only as of today, discussion items to follow shortly)
pretty-printing of level- comments on blog entries
this has been the case in my own elearning2.0 blog for a couple weeks... much nicer display of comments and trackbacks on blog entries in blog one-entry view
access to experimental 'blog-forum' ajaxian discussion forum view
the main banvigation links now include 'forum' which points to a new forum-view for the weblog. I'll post a lot more detail about it when it's a bit more mature, but do try clicking on the icons at the far left of rows to fetch the row's subcontents/replies, an do explore the ajaxian batching and blog-like navigation ... actually, ince there is so little demo content in those weblogs, try this link instead for blog-forums - experimental - for KNotations weblog.

Over the course of today we'll be concentrating on the blog-forum views so that we have a good permalink for discussion items, and also try to 'enliven' some of the member profile features which sre represented by static data in the NGRF demos.


Mike Malloch; 22-November-2005 05:27:43 forum (0)