CUNY Academic Commons

While I hoped to do this at some point, it was, until our last meeting, a later stage project. The redesign of the profiles have moved it up because the general consensus for the profiles is that they should have a design that doesn't include the current header on the commons with logo/search/main nav.

• Main Commons Navigation
• Logged in navigation (My Blogs, My Commons, My Groups, Notifications of friend requests and messages)
• Blog Admin (New Post, Manage Comments, Dashboard, Themes...)
• Log Out

Thoughts and suggestions are welcome of course

I've created some prototypes of the redesigned bar

the bar on the Commons Homepage
http://teachingmultimedia.com/commons/portfolio_protoype/wp-bar.html

The bar on a blog
http://teachingmultimedia.com/commons/portfolio_protoype/wp-bar-blog.html

The bar on a portfolio
http://teachingmultimedia.com/commons/portfolio_protoype/wp-bar-portfolio.html

• My Commons/My Blogs/ My Groups has been condensed and put on the right with a small user icon and the notifications
• On the Main Commons site the nav is listed in the bar after the logo
• On a blog the standard wp bar features are listed in the bar after the logo. The Commons navigation is still available through a dropdown by the Commons Logo

I should also note that this bar is a bit taller than the one we have now so the Commons logo didn't appear too small.

We can talk about this more in the 2/15/13 meeting

Thanks, Chris -- looking forward to discussing this with you today.

Also: is the CAC logo what is driving the height of the nav bar? I think we could make the logo smaller. And I do take Boone's point about working with/from the default WP nav bar.

Many apologies for multiple comments/emails, but I think that this is really promising, Chris.

Could I ask one or more members of the team to have a look at the issues above and make a comment or two about the current implementation of the admin bar on cdev? Thanks.

Looking back at this after some time, here are some thoughts:

-- we wanted to have the CAC logo appear in the top nav primarily for the new profile section. I think it makes sense for that section. But on other parts of the site, like groups, what we'll now have is the CAC logo repeated in the nav bar and the header. And then, the logo will also appear in subdomain blogs, where it may form a poor contrast with a blog's design or color scheme. Are we sure it makes sense for the logo to appear in the nav across all of these areas of the site?

-- I would like to show this to our designer to see whether he has any thoughts about the visuals

-- I'm not a fan of the blue text on the drop downs; that text should probably be white for the sake of contrast/readability

I think we should put this on our agenda to talk through on Friday.

Moving it to Friday for discussion is problematic, because it's currently slated for the 1.5 release on Thursday.

I can remove the feature altogether for the release, but it'll take some adjustment (at least in the profile section, which has been built with the new admin bar in mind).

Hmmm. Okay. Let's keep it in the release and iterate, then, based on our discussion on Friday.

I do think that the submenu text color should be changed immediately, though. Is there any other low-hanging fruit in my notes that we can discuss pre-release?

Yes, agree that's not low-hanging fruit and also agree that a changing nav bar is not ideal. But neither is having the CAC logo repeat twice for any user who is visiting a group, so I think we should hash this out on Friday.

Looks like the blue links were caused by a recent upgrade to WP. Fixed in https://github.com/castiron/cac/commit/0c611f3d562ab58c8a99fda21f92642552bfd36c

OK, yes let's hash this out on Friday. In addition to the things that have been talked about already, on touch screens it would be good to only expand the menu when you click on the logo (right now it goes to the home page).

I also agree that the blue text doesn't work very well and the duplication of the logo is a little weird. It feels like overkill. Maybe we could just use text in the logo section of the admin bar like in a Twitter Bootstrap navbar. It can still be a hover menu but it won't have such a large logo. We could even condense the title a little to CUNY Commons?

Thanks, Chris and Dom (Chris, good point about touchscreens).

Dom, I like your idea of seeing how it would look without a logo but just with the words "CUNY Academic Commons" (don't think we should shorten it to CUNY Commons for branding reasons - we want to be consistent). Boone, would it be possible to test out going back to the words "CUNY Academic Commons" instead of the logo so that we could see how it looks, or would that require too much time?

I've removed the logo in https://github.com/castiron/cac/commit/5de22cff88d7e1ab523f34605f6912ffe7a230d2

Have a look at http://cdev.gc.cuny.edu/members/

Thanks, Boone. I have to say that I think this is the way to go -- much less obtrusive, much more subtle, which I think is what you want in a sitewide nav bar. And it avoids the problem of the repeated logo noted above.

What do others think?

One note: If we decide to go with text instead of a logo, I'd love to have a screenshot or two of the version with the logo in various parts of the site (homepage, member profile, group, subdomain blog, wiki) so that we could show the subcommittee our process.

I think the text is much better. It fits better with the look of the rest of the toolbar.

Really interesting thought, Ray. I'd say that it points to a possible future iteration but that we should stick with text for now. We should also consider/discuss, for the future, a possible black/white/gray version, since I think that the repetition of the color is part of the problem. Ideally, I'd like to get all of these ideas into the hands of our graphic designer to see what he can do with it. But I love this creative thinking, Ray.

Sounds good. Micki, can you please add this to our team meeting agenda for Friday?