Forums | Mahara Community

Pedagogy /
Improving Layout and Look


anonymous profile picture
Account deleted
Posts: 12

06 June 2011, 7:13

Considerations for future improvements and changes

  • Is there potential to have the same top level navigation on all pages (including page/view).
    • Navigation bar at the very top of each page with drop down menus.
    • Second level navigation to be displayed as drop-down menus.
  • Users can be unclear on how to go back to their profile – replacing the unclear jargon of ‘dashboard’ with a defined home button (as in current version) would improve navigation.
  • If there are technical or usability reasons that prevent having the same navigation throughout the site, we feel it would be better to make the small rollover panel (on the page view) visible without the need for mouse over. It is difficult to locate for new users and hinders navigation.
  • There is no obvious link to your own Profile page. Can this be added to the main site navigation (1st or 2nd level).

 

 Future look

* This design and colour scheme were done as mock-ups with a Robert Gordon University theme in mind and are not indicative of a final design, but are to provide an example of what a Mahara website of the future could look like.

                          

 


anonymous profile picture
Account deleted
Posts: 59

06 June 2011, 9:47

There is always an option to switch off the  small header menu in the site configuration settings:

Site Administration > Site Options > General Settings >> Turn Small page headers  on/off

This would fix your consideration right now, without any modification to the code?

I agree about the onRollOver menu, it has confused a lot of clients/users.

Iñaki Arenaza's profile picture
Posts: 253

07 June 2011, 12:38

There is always an option to switch off the  small header menu in the site configuration settings:

Site Administration > Site Options > General Settings >> Turn Small page headers  on/off

Hey, thanks for the tip! I didn't know about it and it's very useful for us!

Saludos.
Iñaki. 

Lino Oliveira's profile picture
Posts: 54

14 June 2011, 7:26

It would be interesting that this feature could be enabled / disabled per user and not in site administration.

anonymous profile picture
Account deleted
Posts: 59

17 June 2011, 14:46

I agree Lino, would make more sense.

anonymous profile picture
Account deleted
Posts: 12

08 June 2011, 3:31

Thanks,

I am not sure we would want it to be switched off completely?

Would you still be able to navigate away from the 'create a page/view' page?

anonymous profile picture
Account deleted
Posts: 59

11 June 2011, 17:16

Quick fix for those who don't want the main navigation to be hidden:

main nav

In theme/template/viewmicroheader.tpl Line 24:

remove the class "js-hidden" from the main-nav div.

i.e.

From this:

<div id="mainnav" class="js-hidden">

To this:

<div id="mainnav" class="">

This removes the hiding feature I think.. :) Someone please confirm, i suspect this is a weird way to disable it.

Dirk Meyer's profile picture
Posts: 425

19 June 2011, 23:56

Thanks Thomas for looking this up.It was working intermittendly for me.

I had a play with this and now its showing on entry of every page and stay visible.  I deleted the entire script below, one closing </div>tag and line 24 <div id="mainnav" class="js-hidden">

The only drawback I see is that the menu will be included in print view.

One could also change both duration values from {'duration': 0.25}); to {'duration': 0.00}); and the setStyle('mainnav', {'display': 'none'}); to setStyle('mainnav', {'display': 'all'}); which would show it on page entry but dissappear once hovered over which is not what I wanted either so I deleted the whole thing.

<script type="text/javascript">{literal}
        addLoadEvent(function(){
            setStyle('mainnav', {'display': 'none'});
            removeElementClass('mainnav', 'js-hidden');
            connect('mainnav-container', 'onmouseenter', function(e) { appear('mainnav', {'duration': 0.25}); });
            connect('mainnav-container', 'onmouseleave', function(e) { fade('mainnav', {'duration': 0.25}); });
        });
        {/literal}
        </script>

Kristina Hoeppner's profile picture
Posts: 4871

23 June 2011, 5:33

Hi Daniel,

Stacey and Paul worked on drop-down menus at MaharaUK11:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/mahara/+bug/801081

Cheers

Kristina

Stacey Walker's profile picture
Posts: 39

23 June 2011, 6:23

Thanks Kristina,

As mentioned, Paul and I have added a global config option to switch a dropdown menu display on or off.  We are just going to do a bit of browser testing and some tweaks in the CSS (some of the packaged themes don't quite suit this layout as much as others ;) and then we'll submit it to review for core inclusion.

It's a simple but hopefully helpful alteration and we've tried to make it as easy as possible for designers to customise their own themes to work with this option switched on as well. Just a few new lines of CSS for the themes styles.css file.

Example of this in action with the default theme is:Mahara Dropdown Menu Example

Stace

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