[Design-team] Seeking feedback on a prototype

[Ryan Lerch]

On 02/23/2015 03:43 PM, Ralph Bean wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 18, 2015 at 08:27:56AM +0530, Ratnadeep Debnath wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> On Tue, Feb 17, 2015 at 11:28 PM, Ralph Bean <rbean at redhat.com> wrote:
>>> The demo is up on my website[1].
>>>
>>> We have tons of apps run by Fedora Infrastructure and a long-time
>>> complaint is that they have inconsistent theming, and no chrome that
>>> ties them together -- that makes them look like they're all part of
>>> the same thing.  Theming them consistently or adding a unifying chrome
>>> would be awesome, but a very challenging and time-consuming task.
>> The way to go about will be to have base templates and static files as
>> a separate repository, where all the consistent look and feel related
>> work (navbar, forms, footer, etc.) goes.
>> Other projects can add this repo as a submodule and extend and
>> customize it as needed.
> That would be awesome.  I agree that it's the right technical
> solution.  There's a social element to the problem though, that we
> all of our app developers haven't been able to settle on a common set
> of tools, libs, and frameworks.  Some of us use bootstrap, some of us
> use a 'koji.css' file that's been passed around, the qa-devel group
> uses Zurb Foundation.. etc (we use different template engines as well.
> Some jinja2, some mako, there are others).

Yeah, this is pretty much the big issue here. Just observing, it seems 
that a lot of the new stuff going forward is beginning to use bootstrap, 
so having a theme for that might be the way to go. For all the other 
stuff, having a implementation somewhere that we can "fork" and keep 
with the other apps might be the way to go. This will be a maintainece 
nightmare, but it really is the best way to go, IMHO.

If we force the apps to fit the theme, it makes the templates and other 
app code more unmaintainable, so my theory here is to take the 
unmaintainabilty hit in the CSS, as we can at least see "visually" if an 
app looks like what we want.

Also, very interested in getting this consistent look and feel working 
-- It might be a good first step here to try to identify what apps we 
are talking about, and what backends / templating systems they use.

cheers,
ryanlerch
>
> Like I mention below, the hope with the prototype menu is that it can
> be lightweight enough that it can work unintrusively in all those
> environments -- that it can provide *some* commonality without trying
> to force all these different development groups to make changes
> they're unwilling to make.
>
>>> This little prototype is an attempt at making a single line of
>>> javascript that we could include in each app to add a floating button
>>> that pulls up a menu taking you to other Fedora apps.  It could
>>> potentially display other information like "how to join!" and "don't
>>> forget to book your tickets for Flock!" and.. etc.  It falls short of
>>> a unifying chrome, but I tried to make it simple enough that it won't
>>> collide with the layouts and style of other pages.. something we could
>>> actually deploy without exhausting ourselves.
>> The menu indeed looks nice. However, I have some concerns regarding
>> how new users will perceive it. Usually people are used to navbars and
>> sidebars in most websites. I think our menu content is much similar to
>> the navbar content at http://www.myntra.com/, top level menu items and
>> sub items for each top level item. http://www.myntra.com/ has
>> implemented the navbar with a lot of data in a very elegant way. We
>> can load the navbar as a separate snippet from our CDN. The cache in
>> the CDN gets invalidated and updated with changes happening for
>> apps.fp.o.
> Cool.  To get it work as a navbar at the top we'd have to be able to
> get it to play nicely with all the other nav bars that all our other
> apps have built-in already (they almost all have a navbar at the top
> already, so we'd have to insert our DOM elements above it or.. do
> something fancy).  I'm afraid it would break, but I'll try and mess
> with it and see if I can come up with something.  I used the
> 'bottom-left' corner for the little button on this because I couldn't
> think of a Fedora App that's using that real-estate for anything
> already.
>
>
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