One of the side projects I've been working on for the last six weeks or so is a little redesign of the Joomlabamboo site as well as a new documentation or knowledge base for our Joomla templates and Joomla extensions. I've just taken another swing through the knowledgebase and although there is still a little way to go, it's progressing quite nicely. I'm hoping that we may launch early in the new year even if it's just a soft launch while we iron out the kinks and take feedback on usability etc.

For those that are interested I thought I would post a screenshot of the new doc site design and give a little run down of the features we are including on the docs site. It's our first foray into working with Flexi Content and I have to say I am really enjoying the flexibility that this component offers.

firstly - the screenshot

This may not end up being the absolute final version but you can see some elements in the design that will be carried through to the main Joomlabamboo site redesign. I've used a lot of fixed elements on the page here so as you scroll the top menu, search area and left menu stay fixed in position. This means that the user can access the navigation etc without needing to scroll up the page - each doc page is reasonably long so as you can imagine this greatly improves the usability on the page. Ill discuss the pros and cons of splittiong up the docs into smaller pages below, but for now checkout the screenshot.

information architecture

One of the difficulties in running a site as large as Joomlabamboo is being able to keep the content organised in a logical and accessible manner. As the site has grown, some of the decisions that we made while rebuilding the site a year ago, are starting to show their age and we are constantly coming up against the basic limitations of the joomla core - such as not being able to have multi-categories or tagging content etc. This year has been as much about the CCK as it has been about Joomla frameworks and so rather than try to implement small extensions to solve those issues I decided to be adventurous and implement the new docs with a cck - namely FlexiContent.

Why Flexicontent?

Although I've been using K2 extensively this year on this blog and also in our Joomla templates, I decided to start using Flexicontent for a couple of different reasons.

One of the biggest advantages flexi offers and that I wanted to use on the new site was have much greater flexibility over positioning of custom fields. As far as I know K2 is not able to do this but I've heard some rumours of a plugin that's in development that may change this (Actually Ive just found out that the Sherpa plugin is aimed at doing exactly that). The templating in Flexi is actually incredibly flexible and so granular that it's a little overwhelming when you first start out. I've had a few different head scratching moments and each time I come back to the doc site I need to remember how to think "Flexi" rather than Joomla or K2.

Live Search

The search button on our current site is actually pretty hard to find. Hiding it a panel as we have reduces clutter but does not aid use so I wanted to implement the search tool for the knowledgebase so it's always in view. In addition I've implemented a live search feature which means results will appear as you type. Live search is not the newest kid on the block but it's certainly a big help when it comes to speeding up sifting through pages and pages of data.

Long or short pages?

One of the major considerations was whether or not to split the documentation up into smaller portions. At the moment the doc pages are pretty long but even though load time is increased somewhat on the longer pages I feel like having one document as a compilation of the notes that relate to a single template the best way of organising the information. One tool that we are looking at is implementing a dynamic table of contents plugin that will go through and grab all of the anchors on a page and generating links that will scroll the user to the appropriate section when clicked. This is still in development and probably wont appear when we first launch but I think this will help considerably with sorting through the pages.

There is plenty more to talk about and I may well follow this post with another in the next few days and give a sneak peak of the Joomlabamboo main site redesign, but in the meantime I'd love to hear from you feature requests for the docs site to help us improve the way we get the information out to you.

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