Mike Malloch talks about his recent experiments at developing ‘cleaner’ skins for KNotes, his forthcoming Plone power-blogging tool, which you can see in action on his ELearning 2.0 blog.
I like the direction the look is heading. My major usability concerns at this point (for readers, anyway) are in the discussion interface. Right now, the discussion on a post is in a separate pop-up window (apparently based on the KFastFolders product) from the main post itself. And the UI for that screen is complex, unfamiliar and rather off-putting for a casual reader. (Or even a not-so-casual reader such as myself.)
I would suggest that the KNotes team implement a more standard threaded discussion view beneath the full blog post, and make the “Fast Folders” style view an option that can be turned off.
Thanks very much for your comments John.
We completely agree that the current discussion system is a mess, and that it should be replaced with a standard threaded-comments interface for KNotes. In fact, we’ve been working on this in test instances and will be unleashing it on the public soon. Our own user groups have been telling us pretty much the same thing for some time, but it’s been hard to make the development time to push the changes through.
By the way, the reason for the messy but ambitious current system is that our ultimate goals include some ‘improvements’ on conventional threaded discussion. It was unfortunate that we inflicted half-finished placeholders for future functionality on our users instead of the simple interfaces people expect
)
regards
Mike
Right on, Mike — can’t wait to see the fruits of your labors!