[Koha-devel] Interface Design Patterns

[Joshua M. Ferraro]

Hi all,

Owen Leonard and I have been working on improvements to the
organization, markup, and style of the Koha 3.0 templates. I just
want to summarize our progress thusfar.

1. We've been primarily working on the Staff client as the OPAC had
a fairly massive overhaul recently and we're pretty confident we've
solved most of the design problems there and can easily apply those
styles to the 3.0 OPAC at any time.

2. we moved all the non-.inc files out of the includes/ directory,
and moved all the .tmpl files into a modules/ directory. We also
created a lib/ for external libraries such as YUI, Jquery, the 
calendar library. CSS and JavaScript are now contained in the
css/ and js/ dirs respectively.

3. We've started working on a 'style guide' for Koha templates that
is a collection of recommended conventions, background on organization
of the templates, and a discussion of 'patterns', 'idioms', and
other UI terminology and concepts:

http://wiki.koha.org/doku.php?id=en:documentation:templates_style_guide

4. Started organizing the Koha pages into categories based on
the 'pattern' of the page. For instance, there are two pages with
a type of 'login' (the installer login page and the main auth.tmpl).
Many many pages in Koha fall into the pattern of 'form + filter',
and we've laid out the common elements and will be defining conventions
for how the markup and style will work for the default 3.0 templates.
More patterns will follow as we identify and define conventions for
them.

5. We're validating pages as we go, with the goal of having all 
pages completely valid in 3.0 as they are in 2.2.

That's about all I can think of at the moment ... we're meeting again
tomorrow to continue along this track, and I'll report back here as
we make progress.

Cheers,

-- 
Joshua Ferraro                       SUPPORT FOR OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE
President, Technology       migration, training, maintenance, support
LibLime                                Featuring Koha Open-Source ILS
jmf at liblime.com |Full Demos at http://liblime.com/koha |1(888)KohaILS