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.
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.
It's a very rough early prototype, but how do people like the general approach? Is anyone on this list interested in taking it and running with it? The source is on github[2]
A cool thing about it technologically is that it pulls its data for the menu from the same source[3] as the apps.fp.o landing page[4]. So, as we update that site, the menu will get auto-updated everywhere. We can do other neat stuff like 'indicate the status of each app -- is it working correctly at the moment or has the infra team marked it as "down for maintenance"'.
Cheers- -Ralph
[1] http://threebean.org/fedmenu/ [2] https://github.com/fedora-infra/fedmenu/ [3] https://apps.fedoraproject.org/js/data.js [4] https://apps.fedoraproject.org
Hi,
On Tue, Feb 17, 2015 at 11:28 PM, Ralph Bean rbean@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.
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.
Regards, rtnpro
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@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).
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.
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@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.
design-team mailing list design-team@lists.fedoraproject.org https://lists.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/design-team
On Tue, Feb 24, 2015 at 2:28 AM, Ryan Lerch rlerch@redhat.com wrote:
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@redhat.com wrote: 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.
+1
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.
I am not able to get the point here. Most templating solutions allow extending from base templates and customizing them as needed. Links to CSS are also part of the templates, usually, in some template blocks, which can be extended or overwritten. By having a common codebase for base templates will actually be a step towards DRY: Don't Repeat Yourself approach.
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.
I think we should standardizing and creating guidelines around how to write apps for Fedora. We can have boilerplate codes in different frameworks which people can fork/include and start working. If individual projects need to override some UI or behaviour, they can always do that. In this way, we try to enforce the common theme/templates/styles for all Fedora apps and standardize and speed up the app development process.
Regards, rtnpro
design-team@lists.fedoraproject.org
-
Ralph Bean -
Ratnadeep Debnath -
Ryan Lerch