The 2013 Minnesota WordCamp was fantastic! Eventually, I’d like to replace this post with substantive content. But for the time being, here’s a link to the slide deck.

bbPress side of things

Let’s concentrate first on how the bbPress search should work. Specifically, what should you get when you search for a keyword. There seems to be three main approaches:

Search all, return all

When you search for a keyword, bbPress looks for its custom post types (Forums, Topics and Replies) and will return all items that match the keyword. It should show in the search results template what kind of element each link corresponds to. Maybe it’d make sense to show results for Forums at the top, and Topics+Replies next. For this kind of search, returning items ordered by recency seems to be the logic way to go.

Search replies, return replies

Pretty much the same as the last approach, but the results will only contain links to replies. I think someone mentioned phpBB does this, but I’m not sure. This approach seems best suited for a forum where recency has a lot of weight (news, tech, etc).

Search replies, return topics

In this case bbPress will look for the keyword in replies, but return only the parent topics of those matched replies. Of course it’d show each topic only once. Interestingly, here, the results could be ordered by relevance instead of recency (the count of replies in that topic that match the searched keyword). I’m totally biased, because almost all my experience with bbPress is implementing big scale support forums, and for support this approach wins every time.

Regardless of the approach, we should also consider the idea of having an advanced search mode out-of-the-box, where you could, at least, filter on which Forum you want to search. Maybe make it context aware? If I’m in a Forum, it searches within this forum. If I’m at a Topic it searches within it’s replies.

Let’s not forget pages & posts!

The second part of the discussion is harder to solve. How bbPress search should integrate with the standard WordPress search? Here we agreed this seems more like an UX problem than a technical one. Again, a couple of different approaches:

Independent

By far, the easiest to implement. Let’s just have a different search box for bbPress, use a different query_var, keep the bbPress custom post types defined as exclude_from_search and off we go. (Actually, jjj showed us that this is kinda already implemented, at least for topics: example)

Independent but unified

Use the same WordPress search form, but when the users initiate a search from a non bbPress page, run the normal search. If the user searches from inside a bbPress page, run our search. I’ve implemented this in the past and I don’t like it. It’s quite confusing to get different behaviors for the same action.

Integrated

Again, totally biased, but I love how we resolved this here at Modern Tribe (example). I think for some sites it’d be a killer feature the ability to combine results like that. To be honest, I can’t think of a bbPress implementation I’ve done that would not be well served with a search results page like this one. On the other hand, the general consensus was that making something like this look good in any theme would by quite impossible. Specially when you realize we need to take into account custom post types, different ratios of content in each content type, etc.

I’m probably forgetting parts of the discussion, and this is getting long, so I’ll shut up now and make room(?) for you in the comments. What do you think?

I’ve got nothing against Responsive Design. In fact, I think it’s great. This isn’t a critique of responsive design inasmuch as it’s a critique of how we as a community adopt mantras at the expense of our process.

We Love to Love Things

We (the web creation industry) did what we do best with brilliant insights. We wholeheartedly, unabashedly embraced it. New grid systems, and javascript libraries were produced seemingly overnight. For decades we have looked at a 400x500px jpg the same way. Suddenly it’s got a certain allure, a newfound responsive sexiness that we didn’t see before. As with any new web technology, we see it start to pop up in our internal work first. Designers portfolios were flexible. Conference websites looked as slick on my busted ass iPhone 3G as they do on my equally busted 24 inch Dell monitor. We were preaching to the choir and the choir was singing along in perfect harmony.

All is not well in the world

Here’s where I go all Debby Downer on you. Somewhere in-between Ethan Marcotte’s line in the sand and www.mediaqueri.es we went from “Responsive Design” to “responsive design.” The goal became – “make this fat site skinny. Look! it animates as it gets skinnier.” Responsive design became an implementation technique and not a design strategy, the html version of a glossy button. It skipped right over all the things that we learned from “Mobile First” and “Content First” and “Users First” and went straight to the fun part. Design is more than what you end up seeing on the screen.

I love working in photoshop. I love writing code (most days). To me there is no better way to spend a day than designing something and seeing it come to life. We need to remember the core principles of Design happen before photoshop and textmate. It’s not about how to make fat websites skinny. That’s a byproduct, that’s implementation. It’s about how we as designers and builders and keepers of the internet magic fairydust can provide better solutions for our users and for our clients. That, as we all well know, happens before the first pixel comes into digital being.

Back in the dark ages (like 6 months ago), we debated whether or not websites also needed apps and whether those apps should be native or web. We were forced to start at the beginning. What do users need when they’re on their phones? Do people interact differently when they’re on their couch vs their desk chair? If I’m browsing this site while I’m driving in traffic, how can I get what I need without killing someone? Producing device specific code was costly. It wasn’t something that you could just toss off in a week or two before launch. The scope and scale of the effort necessitated the use of our whole brains. We approached it with Design with a capital D. For the record, we screwed it up all over the place. We made some good decisions, and many more bad ones. I’m sure the collective budgets of every poorly conceived and unnecessary iPhone app could feed a small nation for the next decade.

Design with a Capital D

Design is a multifaceted beast. It is UX. It is Content. It is Context. It is Visual. It is even Marketing and Branding . It’s the meat and the sizzle as I like to say (I’ve never once said that, punch me if I ever say anything remotely that lame). My personal challenge is to remember that this shit is complicated and beautiful. Lets not cheapen it by making things skinny, patting ourselves on the back, and moving on. It’s time to go back to our process and start thinking about device and context when we kick off a new project. How does responsive thinking affect our content strategy? How does it affect our advertising (there’s a great discussion of this starting now at markboulton.co.uk)? How does it effect our ongoing deployment strategies and feature releases? How does responsive thinking make our own businesses stronger?

So I’m the guy that asks a bunch of annoying questions and then bails. Before I do, let me reiterate for clarity. I believe much of the thinking on responsive design has been absolutely brilliant. It is Big Think at it’s finest. I love the questions and I love the discussion. Since then, we’ve become enamored with the output and not the process. Hopefully, I’ll be back soon with answers or more likely questions.

Also, check out Brandon’s awesome talk: The Anarchist and the Patriot

The app is in a constant state of improvement and as active users, we have requests. If you happen to use Balsamiq and want to weight in, vote up our requests:

Shortcut Key to quick add + add item where my mouse is.

Export PNG to Cloud App

Check out our WordPresss admin patterns for some examples of balsamiq in action.

I wrote more on my blog. Slides embedded below:

It took me a while to get a product out, but now I did. I’m not counting on a bazillion sales here, but as soon as I sell one copy I’ll call this a success. I’m about to hit up the Harvest peeps and see what kind of promotion I can get.

3rd in a series of WordPress admin patterns. The pattern is for the Add New Post screen (post editor) in WordPress 3.0. Please not that while it is most likely feature complete, they are still fussing with it just a little bit, so I may have to fine tune it for the public release. Hopefully for all you devs out there about to crack open custom post types, this should give you a great foundation for quickly wireframing out your new plugin.

Download Balsamiq Post Add / Edit Pattern: Post Editor.bmml

Next up: media lightbox & widget management.

For updates, release information and tips about Shane & Peter’s open source WordPress plugins or redmine core ux/ui, ipad or the freelance lifestyle, follow Shane on twitter @justlikeair and visit http://tri.be.

2nd in a series of wordpress admin Balsamiq patterns. This pattern is for the WordPress 3.0 Beta admin comment list.

Download the Pattern: Comments List.bmml

For updates, release information and tips about Shane’ & Peters open source wordpress plugins or redmine core ux/ui, ipad or the freelance lifestyle, follow Shane on twitter @justlikeair and visit http://tri.be.

DOWNLOAD WORDPRESS POST LIST BALSAMIQ PATTERN

I have been having a great time working with balsamiq to quickly push out wireframes for projects. We have a few large wordpress plugins in the works for customers which will really take advantage of 3.0 custom post types.

Up till now a lot of UI work when designing plugins was a bit of the wild west. With Jane heading up the UI/UX team and Tracy working on a design and ui standards doc, I was inspired to build some patterns which would help our crew build cleaner and easier to use plugins. I wanted to start by being better in line with the wordpress UI. So I am working on a simple Balsamiq pattern for the most modified parts of the wordpress 3.0 admin.

Peldi, the lead over at Balsamiq saw the news of my computers demise and offered out to help (now that’s customer service). I’ll post more as they come up. He might also post them (with my blessing) on mockupstogo.net.

These are not pixel perfect. For that, we would need Peter’s discerning eye, but for the wordpress plugin developer who wants to have a nice wireframe to start from, its a nice tool.

For updates, release information and tips about our open source wordpress plugins or redmine core ux/ui, ipad or the freelance lifestyle, follow me on twitter @justlikeair.