Menu items

 
222
vote

The left nav menu items need to be grouped more intelligently and renamed consistantly.

Do we want to stick with the "My" motif, or the hipper (?) "Your" concept, or something else?

with regard to the "Your" concept

Personally, I would be in favour of the "Your" concept. Not only it's "hipper"... I think it also better refers to web 2.0 ideas of "interdependency".

"My/me" suggests that at least part of the site is considered as the user's more or less personal domain. Wouldn't it be more in line with recent developments when users/visitors of web services are less seen as independent individuals, but more as welcome guests to parts of the administrator's site, (i.c. community), and would be addressed to as "You" from the administrator's point of view. The "Your" concept in fact might highlight that the user/visitor is that welcome guest on the site indeed, but always in relation to other "customers".

Metaphorically speaking, compare Crossroads.world66.com to the favorite bar in town where the barman (contact facilitator) welcomes both the hard core of regular costumers and surprise visitors... Only regular customers, however, have personalised "You" status.... i.e. they're know by name by the barman and by other regular customers.

Below, I've put a sketch down of some elements of the left nav menu in possible "Your" style, just as an example... to the left = user UI nav; to the right = corresponding CR database registrations

YOUR CROSSROADS * home * recent posts * messages

* friends * invite friends

* blog * new entry

* favorites * treks    * text input <-------------------> CR db/featured treks/txt   * GPS input <-------------------> CR db/featured treks/gps * destinations <----------------> CR db/featured destinations * beware! <---------------------> CR db/don't visit

* Logout

COMMUNITY CROSSROADS * Blogs * Forums * Recent changes * Search

TRAILS * [select RSS-feed]

Developments

I've already started to remove some of the duplicate navigation but next week I'd like to rollout a bigger update incorporating some of your suggestions. I'll try to get rid of all the redundancies, group things a little better, and move to a more consistant labelling.

I'm not sure about the Treks section though. I think there should be context sensative "featured content" on blogs, destination pages, the front page, etc... but I dont think we need a link to it in the left nav.

Also, could you explain the "GPS" feature a little more?

"GPS" feature

Well, I think it makes sense, for the time being, to wait and see what/how GPS features will come up in a near future rollout(s), if you don't mind. I will by then have (your) frame of reference to respond to.

Terminology

By "GPS" to you mean geo-centric things like geotagging and lat/long attributes?

Geotagging and lat/long attributes?

Definitely. Let me quote from/comment on a Linuxjournal article where I got most of my imagination/information from...

[...] Known geographic link sites like Multimap and A2B limit users in their selection of available services. I think CR should maximize user geo-centric input for highly flexible target group oriented navigation. The more so since [...] CR targets to Bloggers, Travelers and Photographers, users par excellence who can either provide new context to their articles by supplying specific geographic information about where they are writing from, or can provide viewers with information necessary for better understanding the picture by informing them of where it was taken. Also various environmental services are now beginning to offer syndication feeds for weather and earthquakes and so on. By geo tagging these feeds, users could sort, search and display information by region and location. As a result, they would gain a better picture of the current events happening in a requested area [...].

I experimented and posted a first thing in the Galleries section on integration of Google Earth/Google Maps .kml and .kmz files. I asked for a graphics toolkit to be enabled in CR that supports those files. There is a Drupal KML module available. Location · Modules geodan - September 4, 2006 - 23:15 The KML module allows people to access spatially enabled information in Drupal through the Google Earth interface (requires location.module for storing coordinates)

Well, this is about the things I'm thinking of/have done so far, nothing revolutionary, I think ... but you asked me to explain the "GPS" feature a little more :-)

Great!

Sounds like we're on the same wavelength.

What you're describing is a lot like what we have mapped out in the roadmap.

I've been looking a lot of the neat Geo/mapping modules that are being developed for Drupal and, of course, we're going to be doing a lot of custom/travel-specific development as well.

Thanks for the article pointer as well...

~maj

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