Navigation Overhaul

**3dKiller** · 06-22-2006, 09:51 PM

We need to update the navigation system in Pligg. As most of you know I suggested a horizontal tabbed nav system some time ago.

http://www.storylinker.com/media/2-0a/

Well, now digg 3.0 is set to release on Monday June 26... and guess what, they're using a horizontal tabbed nav system. Surprise!

http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/06/22...ots-and-stats/

Podcast interview w/Kevin & Jay: http://talkcrunch.com/wp-content/Tal...p010-Digg3.mp3

So I'm curious, what do you all think we should do? Stay with the old style scattered buttons, or develop an organized mix of intelligent horizontal tabs w/two column body?

~3d

**savant** · 06-22-2006, 10:34 PM

Yeah i say go ahead.

but read somewhere it's quite a task(beatniak)

check out the friends thingee in digg. Thats pretty nice. If we had collabarative filtering that would be cool.

and layout is amazing. nice going digg.

and guess what pligg gets a mention on the comments.
"when is Pligg 3.0 coming out" was that a satire or advertisement.

**3dKiller** · 06-22-2006, 10:52 PM

Savant,

I don't think it would be that hard to fix navigation. All it takes is some .css, and modification of the template .tpl files. I read what beatniak said, I just don't agree with him. We have a developer on board who could do it easily named shrimp.

As for the collaborative filtering, I didn't get to the voting on time, so let me vote 'no' now. I'm down on that idea because reddit did it and it's a complete failure.

Reddit's users are complaining loud and continually about how they miss out on content they would love to read, but can't find because reddit "thinks for them" and won't display what "it" thinks users want to see.

Plus it would take developement time away from much needed things like enhanced social networking, navigation, karma, etc., things we need.

~3d

**savant** · 06-23-2006, 05:15 AM

i guess you're right there,

I don't want them thinking for me, but sometimes life would be easier.

I suppose if you found a way to not let the users miss the content, but on their personal pages just have the ones they like.

anyway this topic is for navigation, and i'm heading back to tinkering with pligg

**Simon** · 06-23-2006, 08:46 AM

Those tabbed navigation screenshots looks really nice, i think they should be implemented when possible. Frankly, whether Digg has them or not is of no concern to me - it's hardly revolutionary for them to come up with the *look of awe on face* horizontal tabbed navbar!

Anyway, aren't those screenshots dated from before Digg 3.0 layout was ever announced?

**gragland** · 06-23-2006, 12:02 PM

I'm working on a tabbed nav system. It wasn't that hard to implement. I have it so that at the top of each page it sets the body id (<body id="topstories">), and then the correct tab stays in focus. The one problem I'm having is that when someone does a search from the search bar the "frontpage" tab stays in focus because the search is happening from index.php (which has <body id="frontpage"> at the top. What I want is to have the "search" tab come into focus when someone does a search.

So, right now I'm trying to get this script working that I found online, which will highlight the correct tab depending on whats in the address bar. So hopefully that will work. But if anyone knows how I could make it change the bodyid to "search" when someone performs a search then that would be easier.

**AshDigg** · 06-23-2006, 12:06 PM

On the latest nightly build I moved searching onto it's own seperate search.php page, so this shouldn't be a problem. It's available here.

thanks

Originally Posted by gragland

I'm working on a tabbed nav system. It wasn't that hard to implement. I have it so that at the top of each page it sets the body id (<body id="topstories">), and then the correct tab stays in focus. The one problem I'm having is that when someone does a search from the search bar the "frontpage" tab stays in focus because the search is happening from index.php (which has <body id="frontpage"> at the top. What I want is to have the "search" tab come into focus when someone does a search.

So, right now I'm trying to get this script working that I found online, which will highlight the correct tab depending on whats in the address bar. So hopefully that will work. But if anyone knows how I could make it change the bodyid to "search" when someone performs a search then that would be easier.

**3dKiller** · 06-23-2006, 12:47 PM

Originally Posted by AshDigg

On the latest nightly build I moved searching onto it's own seperate search.php page

...and it seems to working great! Thanks Ash, nice work!

@Simon - I was thinking of something like what Cnet|News does. Cnet has the tabs, textual links below it, then search centered below that. Its just one component that makes sense when put together. It's also kind of like Google with links on top, then search field directly below that.

That’s it guys, its all about tabs, tags, and search. One component. No more need for categories.

click example: http://news.com.com/

**gragland** · 06-23-2006, 01:24 PM

I want to just use tags, and get rid of categories, unfortunately there are some problems with that. Since search.php handles all tag searches, then you can only have tags sorted one way (right?). But I want it so that if the user is on the frontpage and clicks a tag his tag results only display published stories with that tag, or if hes on queued just display queued stories with that tag, and if hes on topstories.php it should display all results for that tag (published and queued), but ordered by number of votes.

So here's what we need:

1. Next to the search box should be a dropdown menu (all [default], published, queued) to select what you want to search.

2. Also The following friendly URLs:

mysite.com/all/tag/xxx (default)
mysite.com/published/tag/xxx
mysite.com/queued/tag/xxx
mysite.com/topstories/tag/xxx (basically same as "all" but ordered by votes).

Then I could make the it so that the url when you click a tag is "/tag/xxx", so basically
if you are on mysite.com/published/ and you click a tag thats in a post (or wherever) it will just append "/tag/xxx" to your current address and take you to mysite.com/published/tag/xxx.

**3dKiller** · 06-23-2006, 01:50 PM

gragland,

Take a look at how digg does search. They do a pretty good job... and it kinda works. Basically when you do a search on digg, it searches by date. The prob w/digg is it only searches the past 7 days. I think users get confused into thinking thats all there is. You have to manually tell it to search "all" or past 30/60 days.

Since our sites will not get much traffic for many months, I think it's ok to search all as default.

Why break it up? Why separate pub/que/other? Why add yet another "pull down" menu? That just complicates things.

Am I wrong?

~3d