Webnode understands usability and has excellent interfaces for many common website admin tasks. There are many very well done UI elements here that would work well throughout drupal core and many contrib modules, especially panels, asset, views and many others.
- Try a demo: http://www.webnode.com/en/demo/
- Click 'Website Builder' and customize your demo website
A great way to show these UI elements to drupal developers (and help motivate them to integrate them) would be to do a screencast demonstarting the whole application while suggesting contrib modules and core UIs where the demonstrated UI elements would be useful. Is anyone good at doing screencasts? I've never done one, don't know what software to use, and don't have a lot of time to do it.
Another way of getting specific contrib module developers to consider these UI elements is to get screenshots of specific UI elements and post them to appropriate g.d.o groups or issue queues.
Comments
Gregory Heller at
Gregory Heller at CivicActions recommended iShowU for Mac OS X. Looks good to me, not open source though
Bevan/
open source screencasting
Since some people ask me about this I wrote a howto create screencasts.
In short - if you want open source go for Krut. The tools I reviewed are for Windows. There's also good advice in the videocasters group.
knaddison blog | Morris Animal Foundation
I use iShowU
I also use iShowU -- mostly because it renders the video when you stop recording as opposed to SnapzPro, which can take as long to render the video as it does to record it. They may have changed it by now, but the last I checked, iShowU was also a lot cheaper.
And as far as video compression goes, it can be a bit of an art, and here's a link to my personal settings as well as a discussion for other compression settings: http://groups.drupal.org/node/2424#comment-22103
Wow
Thet have good UI, but horrible T&C.
That right there is enough to prevent anything but transient, personal use of the service. Post a picture, and they can sell it, and so forth.
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http://ken.therickards.com/
http://savannahnow.com/user/2
http://blufftontoday.com/user/3
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http://ken.therickards.com/
Pretty standard, really
Pretty standard, really http://www.blufftontoday.com/policy.html
Bluftontoday.com seems to only want a non-exclusive license. I'm not sure whether webnode could claim exclusive or non-exclusive rights to the material.
Savannahnow.com is basically the same as webnode, AFAICT, with the bonus of potentially using that information for what sounds like advertising and potentially junkmail.
knaddison blog | Morris Animal Foundation
True
True, but we don't claim to be a website building and hosting service.
--
http://ken.therickards.com/
http://savannahnow.com/user/2
http://blufftontoday.com/user/3
--
http://ken.therickards.com/
I looked at it
The website looks slick, I tried the "Website builder" and my first thought was, cool. But, after trying to edit an article and other text I was less than impressed. Their front page lists Opera as a supported browser. It works, but the text entry fields I get at that size are about 10x10 characters, so it isn't very good.
Add to that how slow it is, and cluttered...
But, there is lot to be learned, I noticed they have built in meta tags support, windows pop up, but since the windows are modal, and they don't really add that much to the experiencee, so I don't really see the point of them.
The file/image browsers are good, but I couldn't see any meta data support for the images at a quick glance. The image browser could be copied with success, though I would rather like a more generic browser for all content with miniature representations even of nodes. And for such a floating window a lightbox script would actually make sense, for once in its blasted existence.
The widgets seem pretty okay, the Mapping ones are nice. The possibility of embedding widgets directly is cool, and I'm sure it would find a large fan base in drupal if someone made something similar for blocks ;)
There seems to be an intention of using drag and drop for moving stuff around on the page. I couldn't get a google widget clock into the sidebar by dragging and dropping. There is no way of seeing the context of the drag/drop and the drop zones are fuzzy/non-existing?
I actually used a long time finding a way to add a page. I am sure new users to drupal also feel a bit lost the first time, so I won't hold it against them.
I really hope this isn't what drupal will end up as. There are things to be learned, of course, but I'm more comfortable with drupal, tiny MCE and drupalimage plugin in TinyMCE. Yes, drupalimage could use a better gui, but it works for me and my client. Hopefully I can put an s to that last word in the previous sentence soon :)
It is certainly far from
It is certainly far from perfect, but so is drupal. Just like they could learn a lot from drupal (in many areas), drupal can learn a lot from them especially regards UIs.
Interesting, I didn't have this issue on Navigator 9 (FF2 clone) on Mac OS X.
Bevan/
Tried FF2
I'm on Mac OS X as well. It works fine in FF2, in Opera you have to be much more careful about holding the draggable, and move slower in order to see the item.
In FF2 it feels like OS X drag and drop, easy to do, and you can see that the dragged object is in your mouse.
My main question is whether
My main question is whether this degrades at all for users without javascript, and therefore whether it is accessible. It doesn't look like there is an accessible way to do things. I always tend to think about usability and accessibility together, even though sometimes things that are good for one are not so good for the other.
Plus I'm personally not a fan of popup windows and dialog boxes for every task. They're fine for selected tasks, but having something popup every time you try to do anything feels annoying to me. What I like much better are 'edit in place' capabilities. Instead of a popup box jumping up with a textarea to type into, the div on the page dynamically becomes a textarea when you click on it and you type right into the page. There was at least one jQuery plugin that was working on something like that. To me, that is a much nicer user experience.
I do like the little icons at the top of each block that make it easy to see where to click to edit and alter things, and the drag 'n drop methods of organizing the content, and the ability to alter block settings while viewing the page.