Wireframes for Content Staging System

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chrisstrahl's picture

Here are the attached images and PDF of the wireframes we've been working on related to this project. Take a look! I'd love to get some eyes on these and some feedback on the designs.

Couple notes:

  • We changed the name "context states" to "collections" sort of last-minute. I think I managed to change all of the wording, but if you see something that mentions a context state then it should be a collection.
  • Several frames are just notes - including a frame describing how to read the frames :-)
  • Not everything in this set of frames would be considered a minimum viable product. We're going to be talking about a lot of potential solutions, but in terms of what we actually work on we want to be sure we're going to be building a minimum solution and then iterating from there.
  • I've attached both the PDF version of the frames along with the images of each individual frame.

Here are a couple of next steps:

  1. I need to work on revising the user stories based on some of the decisions that were made during the wireframing process.
  2. I'd like to incorporate whatever feedback I can into the documents and re-release one more set of frames / user stories.
  3. Webchick is working on a solution architecture document that does a little more background into other solutions and also sets some technical directions for the system.
  4. I'm going to be showing this system to stevector and some other folks at Palantir to get some of their direct feedback based on the workflow / state machine stuff he's doing.
AttachmentSize
Time Machine Wires.pdf1.49 MB
1. HOW TO READ THIS DOCUMENT.png57.55 KB
2. Time Machine.png31.88 KB
3. Collection Administration.png52.21 KB
4. Collection Admin.png100.7 KB
5. Edit a Collection.png150.85 KB
6. Workflow Admiinstration.png57.81 KB
7. Workflow UI.png156.23 KB
8. Workflow Admin.png87.96 KB
9. Edit a Workflow State.png146.65 KB
10. States UI - Content Entry.png56.05 KB
11. Workflow States UI.png135.99 KB
12. Context States UI.png126.8 KB
13. State History.png91.31 KB
14. Unified UI (alternate approach).png72.53 KB
15. Time Machine UI.png50.19 KB
16. Page (UI example).png137.23 KB
17. Page (current, published).png113.48 KB
18. Page (future date).png125.38 KB
19. Page (future date, collection).png146.6 KB

Comments

Role focus

stevector's picture

Hi Chris,

Thanks for putting this together. I haven't gone through it in detail yet. After skimming, the focus on user roles stood out to me. http://groups.drupal.org/files/6.%20Workflow%20Admiinstration.png

I want to point out that the work I'm doing in this sandbox http://drupal.org/sandbox/stevector/1405838 moves away from roles/permissions-based system that the 1.x branches of Workbench Moderation and Workflow modules use. Instead I'm using CTools Access plugins to allow the site builder to determine a user's access to a particular state/event/workflow on a wider set of attributes. So "Organic Group membership" stands out as one attribute that could determine access.

I agree that roles are the "80% case" and that it is reasonable to build a UI to fit that use case. I think the underlying API's will be more flexible and there could be a more generic UI as well.

Couple questions - generally seems good!

chrisstrahl's picture

Seems like working within roles is artificially limiting. However, most existing solutions (see things like Jira, Redmine, and other competitive CMS apps) use the idea of roles. That said, provided that a UI exists to do the following it should be fine:

  1. Make decisions based on "this particular user should be able to do X and Y, but not Z" - I think CTools access plugins supports this without an issue.
  2. Easily apply a set of access controls to a large group of users (e.g. "clone" a set of workflow permissions or apply it to everyone within a specific group). I don't really know how this works outside of roles... maybe you can shed some light here?
  3. Have a simple way of limiting the number of options. We don't want everyone designing workflow access controls to have a giant cockpit with 500 checkboxes to check. It's fine if someone has this, just not everyone. So, a way to enforce simplicity.

I'll dive a little more into the sandbox this week and see what I can see. Thanks for the review!