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ProcessWire 2016 Roadmap


ryan
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Nothing better to cure The Erector Set than the PW roadmap for 2016!

Everything looks so exciting, thanks for the great work! I look forward to keep developing and contributing to the community this year, it's included in my new year objetives :D

Happy new year!!

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Happy New Year to you, Ryan! Great post - certainly looking forward to the future of ProcessWire. :D

Regarding the redesign of the website: I think a minor logo refresh may be in order. The idea of new branding has been brought up a few times, but I don't think a full refresh is in order - that would simply be to much of a change. This, however makes a lot more sense to me.

Also, I guess that the site refresh would involve minimalism, and maybe a little 'boldness', but not too much. Not sure if I'll be able to make the time for it very soon, but will throw together a few concepts if I do.

:)

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Thanks for updating the roadmap, and a Happy New Year to you too, Ryan! We've got some great things coming this year, no doubt about that :)

Though we might want to discuss this eventually in a separate thread, inspired by Mike's comment above here are some initial comments regarding the site redesign. I'm trying to be as constructive as possible here, so please forgive me for just stating negative things; there's a lot of good too, but right now I feel that it's more useful to point out things that don't feel quite right.

I've mentioned this before, but what I would love to see would be more clarity in regards to navigation and structure. For most parts those are the same thing, but there are also things that are only related to one. The visual side of the site could perhaps use a facelift too, but I wouldn't consider that a top priority right now; in my opinion there are more urgent issues to address, and the site doesn't feel all that outdated to be honest. Great design transcends time and so on ;)

Perhaps the biggest inconvenience for me is that the hierarchy of the site is not really reflected on the navigation. Topmenu items are not items at the top level of the page tree (except that some are), subnav items are often links to other sections of the site or completely separate (sub)sites, etc. One key strength of ProcessWire is the page tree approach, which makes structure sensible and easy to follow. I would like to see that benefit in action on our own site too.

Other than that, I feel that the structure has pretty much grown in an organic way, and as a result of that things are not always where I'd expect to find them, and sometimes adjacent pages feel entirely different in scope. Some pages appear in multiple places, which can also get confusing, though in those cases they're usually redirects to somewhere else on the site. All in all the content architecture of the site doesn't feel very concise to me.

In regards to the subnav, I would like to see some minor usability improvements in upcoming versions. For an example, the first item of the menu is actually the parent page, but visually it's in no way different from its children, which makes it less obvious than it could be. Also, while I still feel that a dropdown menu is often bad for usability and accessibility, it could also take away some of the pain related to "things not being where I expected" :)

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Looking forward to finally getting the forums upgraded to 4.1 - just need to clear some work out of the way and we can get this done in Q1 easily enough, which is something of a necessity since the current version reaches end of support in June.

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