The biggest honking issue in SchoolTool right now is navigation and the general organization of the web interface.
Right now, we've got a few main UI elements: A top bar with the current view's path and a few relevant links to the user's calendar, etc. On the left sidebar, a "Navigation" menu. Below that, an "Actions" menu. I think we have to use the top of the screen to switch between the main blocks of functionality in SchoolTool from the teacher's and student's perspective: calendar, attendance, and gradebook. We could do this with tabs, icons, or perhaps something else. This doesn't necessarily scale indefinitely, if you run out of room for tabs, but we can worry about that later. Probably admin functions would be another tab that only shows up for people with the right permissions. I think we could probably also get rid of the breadcrumb links. They tend to cause problems anyhow when the heirarchy gets too deep and the titles of objects too long. The navigation menu isn't much more than a list of container objects in the database. It is somewhat useful only to admins/managers, who at least have to touch all those places at various times. For teachers and students, the navigation menu should only contain a list of the sections and courses they teach/attend. The action menu will retain its function, but hopefully it will be more focused if only actions relevant to the user for that specific view and object are available at any given time. Anyhow, that's my thinking at this point. I think we can improve things significantly without having to fundamentally rework the UI. Comments? --Tom _______________________________________________ Schooltool mailing list [email protected] http://lists.schooltool.org/mailman/listinfo/schooltool
