Navigation for the tree of information
Implementing something like MediaWiki's CategoryTree, but making it a bit more well designed/intuitive/flexible would give a powerful tool for making Arbital's content easy to explore which would be maintained mostly automatically by tags and subtags.
Brainstorm for improvements:
- An easy way to move up, as well as down, the category system is important.
- Including clickbait or summary would make it much more attractive.
- Adjustable filters would be great. Filter by quality, switch between levels of expertise required? Include/exclude blog posts?
- Including both tagging and parent/child relationship information in the tree.
- Alpha Centauri tech tree style navigation? With extra layers exposed if low branching factor, fading away on the left and right? It's pretty, intuitive, and gives room for the summary, but may not scale well if there is a high branching factor. Clicking on a page in the tree recenters the tree on that page, while loading it below the browsing system.
- Or this kind of column structure? Less flexible and neat, but more familiar and easier to find 3rd party implementations?
Comments
Alexei Andreev
Funny enough we had something like that in an older version. We'll definitely bring it back. One way it would be super useful is for refactoring tags & parents.
Eric Bruylant
Cool, show me the designs/plans when that moves near the top of your list for feedback?
Alexei Andreev
It's super standard explorer type look (but obviously much larger).
Eric Bruylant
nods, seems pretty similar to MW's CategoryTree? It's good to have, but it could be much more awesome with attention. Especially if tags cause complex trees, it'll allow smoother content discovery with a more optimized setup.
What's the plan for navigation back up the tree? If the top level tags are always exposed things could get very messy (a bunch of layers, and possibly multiple paths back to them, since unlike a file tree each page can have multiple direct ancestors, unless you only include parent/child relations.), and if not you need another way to step back up.
Edit: I asked about the name of the UI I'm talking about on StackExchange. Some possibly helpful comments there.
Edit2: It seems like it's allowing multiple parents that breaks the normal navigation things. Maybe some hybrid would work.. I'll do a mockup of what I'm imagining at some point. The UX people are not familiar with it. Probably complex+no third party drop in, so probably quite far down the wish list, even if it would be awesome.
Alexei Andreev
Sounds good, I'd love to see a mockup. Eliezer Yudkowsky, might have ideas about this.