Home page design issues & priorities

[whartung]

I never meant to conflate the DZone aspect with the content aspect, and I'll certainly take your word for it that the content section and the forums are different technically.

But I do want to clarify where I was coming from.

Where you see two separate systems, I pretty much see the same thing.

The content section is stories that can have comments, comments are threaded and can be quoted. At the 10,000 foot level, that sounds like a forum to me, even if it's not "purposed" as such.

You mentioned that the content section has structure, and meta data, and Zone Leaders.

A forum has structure and meta data and Leaders. Whereas a book review might have review author, book auther, isbn, summary, book icon, and book review text, a forum may simply have author, topic, and forum text. Less characteristics to be sure, but still, IMHO, even now at the 5000 foot level, "the same thing", just different meta data.

Well, book reviews have a different layout and presenation than a forum post. Sure, but that can be a property of the book review type (or any "article" type) as well. Say, a Velocity script or XSLT transform.

Forums have moderators that can lock messages, delete messages, move messages, cancel threads, etc. I assume Zone Leaders have similar powers over the content areas.

Forums can have multiple moderators, just like an area can have multiple leaders.

This is what I mean when I say that when I see a forum and the front page content, I see the same things. The software may see a distinction (I mean, this is just (mostly) out of the box "forum" software versus whatever system you use for your content areas), but from a modeling point of view, I see these as the same.

So, that's where that all comes from.

But let me be clear, how they are implemented, per se, does not concern me. I really don't care what or how this stuff is written, what technologies you use, etc.

What I AM concerned about is that these two systems effectively BEHAVE like they are two systems. The systems are not integrated, the UIs are different, presentation is different, etc. That's where the disconnect is.

Whatever posting capabilities, powers and features I have here, I should have in the content area as well. Not necessarily in the creation of topics (obviously, I don't expect any random flotsam I spit out to appear on the front page just because I hit submit), but in terms of in comment threads. I don't even know (I haven't explored to that level) if the two messaging systems even support that same "mini markup" language that many systems have. And if they don't, don't you see that as an issue? Don't you feel that as a service provider that lessens the overall product for such a combined "integrated" site?

For example, if you go over to weblogs.java.net, their posting system is just miserable.

Basically, if you type in a reply much like I'm doing here, the post is one big wall of text because it treats is as HTML. With no markup, HTML is a block of text. And there's no way to edit your post after you've hit submit.

That site violates the "Rule of Least Surprise". After several years, I STILL get stung by that fact because most every other site on the internet works just like this one. Paragraphs and blank lines. Hardly rocket surgery. But for whatever reason, Sun doesn't fix that sites posting system and it's really irritating, more so because it's so unecessary. And mostly because it always catches the unwary off guard. Moder power tools are safer than Suns posting system.

So, by similar logic, I'd hate to format some post for the content side of JL and then come over to the forum side and use the same markup only to have it come out in gibberish because I didn't flip my aging cognitive switch.

Certainly it's less of an issue here, you have a rich editor, but even at a casual glance the two rich editors are different, minimally from the icons alone, but they also behave differently in subtle ways. Plus you have that "plain text" mode etc. on the content section that's not here.

So, those are my nits. Where you see Super CMS on one side and "forums" on the other, I see forums that, in theory, could be implemented within the Super CMS.

But the real issue (in this case) is integraton. While it's wonderful today as a developer to be able to integrate heterogenous services and systems, I think it's less wonderful when that pokes through to the consumers of the services. And here I see, as a consumer, essentiallly the exact same service being leveraged (replying to content), on the same overall "system", yet having to jump through different hoops to perform the task.

However, to be real clear, my biggest overall issue about the whole thing is the content and (apparent) splintering of the community that was once known as JavaLobby. That's a fundamental issue, the rest are nitty details that can be remedied with time.