Content Is King
If the content is truly the main focus of the article creation page, let's give it the attention it deserves. In this mockup the title and text editor are moved as high up the screen as possible. The editor itself can be made much larger with CSS, which makes it much more pleasurable to use.
Category selection, publish state, user group and language selection have all been grouped into the title. Featured gets a switch right next to it.
There's all kinds of save options in Joomla 1.6 so I've consolidated them all into one Save button with dropdown options. Building off the idea of Making User Interface Elements Difficult to Use By Intent from Six Revisions, the Cancel button is a smaller font with no fancy styling. I know I've accidentally hit Cancel in Joomla and been pissed many times.
The Image, Pagebreak, Read More, Toggle Editor, and the new Article button have been moved to the top of the editor for easy access. I renamed the "Article" button "Link to Article" since that's what it does and it confused me at first.
Side Tabs For More Options
Rather than using the default accordions in Joomla for the options, this idea illustrates how we could load those options in the main area of the page. Some of the new options like ACL demand more room.
Bringing Link to Menu Back!
This one's for all your Joomla vets in the room. Remember Link to Menu in Joomla 1.0? It was one of my favorite features that was cut out of 1.5 and 1.6. For the unaffiliated, Link to Menu lets you create a new menu item for the article being edited right from the same page.
We'll add more menu options than Joomla 1.0 had while we're at it.
What's Up Next?
Next time we'll be working on the Article/Menu/Module list views.
