The other day, I received a new mockup of the Mozilla Developer Center’s impending redesign, so I figured I’d share it here.
There are still some changes in the works. For example, the “Recent Changes” link you see is going to move into the “Site Tools” menu.
The “Site Tools” menu includes things like access to the RSS feeds, templates, site map, and other features like that.
The “More” menu includes page-specific features, such as page watching, attaching files or images, access control, page moving, and access to the Talk page for the article.
The buttons in the contents box take you to the corresponding sections of the page.
As you can see, the new design is heavily influenced by the design of the soon-to-arrive new Mozilla.com skin.
If you’re not currently logged in, the space where “Username” appears will include a “Log in” button. Clicking your username takes you to your user page.
The “Other languages” menu at the top right will be a quick and easy way to switch from language to language. Since MindTouch has added polyglot support to DekiWiki for the upcoming “Jay Cooke” release, a single wiki will contain all the articles for every language in which MDC is localized. Simply select the language you want to read the current article in, and not only will the article switch, but the entire UI will be switched to that language as well, and you’ll steer to articles in that language by default.
Immediately below the MDC logo is the breadcrumb bar, which will be present on all pages now, providing a convenient way to backlink to previous articles in the hierarchy.
The “Files” section lists all the files attached to the article. This provides a simple way for sample code to be made available. Instead of having to upload samples to the MDC server (which means, actually, sending them to me so I can upload them), authors will be able to attach the samples directly to their articles, then link to them from within the body of the article.
Similarly, the “Images” section provides the ability to manage the images attached to the article.
And we’ll have a comments section, where page discussion can take place. We may find that we don’t make as much use of the Talk pages as we used to, since it will be possible to comment on articles in place.
I’ll have more screen shots in the coming few weeks as we get closer to launching this new wiki. The development work on the skin itself is in progress now, and hopefully will be up and running so that we can start getting screen shots before too much longer.
Look great! Hope I can do on my end to make it as kick-ass as possible :)
Looks nice sheppy! Thanks for posting this!