Forum .LRN Q&A: Re: .LRN Gardens

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30: Re: .LRN Gardens (response to 1)
Posted by Bruce Spear on
Thanks for the encouragement everyone!  Paul and I are discussing some goals, such as buiding a user interface that allows:

1. Dotlrn Gardens.  We would have alternative master styles that would be systematically applied across the application like any other skin system: users could stroll through the garden and switch on one after another a canned arrangement as they might like.

2. Roll Your Own.  From there we could offer user-friendly customizations of specific portlets and class/my space pages, similar in function to the current page customizations, where you can move things around, choose a logo, and change labels and font styles.

What would the engineering goals be?

1. Clear separation of database, logic, interface, and with the additional layer of a css functionality that speaks to the interface (as Paul has suggested to me) but staying out messing with the interface templates themselves.

It would be great to have others contributing their user and engineering goals so we might compile them and develop our strategies accordingly.

Also, as I am working my way through "Eric Meyer on CSS" and thinking of where I may next want to go I am thinking that there is a great distance between this hands on tutorial and the many wonderful, finished designs of the Zen Gardens and what I might do well to study is an interface design book, one that would help me compare and contrast different interface and web site designs and learn their principles of organization.  I'm wondering if others have come across anything like this.  I find all sorts of books on the topic on the publisher's lists, but I can't scan them online like I can in a bookstore, and the local bookstores don't have more than one or two of such things.  I'm looking for something along the lines of Lynda Weinman's "Creative HTML Design", I'd guess, but more sophisticated, meaning, tuned to the dynamic database-driven web sites that concern us.  Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated!  Thanks!