A friend of mine is working on a Rails CMS (called slate) at WVU. I’ve been following the development via slate info, as well as the screen shots on Flickr. I thought I’d take a minute to give praise to the work they’re doing.
First of all, I’m very impressed with the latest release. I personally think the interface is outstanding. slate does a lot of stuff, and from what I’ve seen, every section is intuitive and focused on the task at hand. The design itself is composed of mostly black, white, and shades of gray. This works well, because it’s easy to draw attention when you need to draw attention. For instance, by changing the sub-heading from black to bright blue, a user is subconsciously forced to pay attention—especially if that’s the only thing that’s bright blue.
I’ve never used slate, but I can tell there is an extreme attention to detail. The development schedule seems to be very realistic (even though I’m sure it doesn’t feel that way at times), which is why I think it’s turning into such a great application. There’s no “throwing it together,” so to speak. Every section seems carefully planned and designed down to the very last pixel, as it should be.
All throughout slate (again, from the screen shots) there is a brilliant use of space. Nothing is too cluttered (line-height really makes a difference). The typeface is very standard and somewhat over-sized, which is a good thing. The menus and options are clear, and they’ve gone the extra mile to make the entire interface very user-friendly.
It’s been fun following their development, and I look forward to reading about what’s to come in the future. Congratulations to Chris and Dave (those guys are the only two I’m aware of) on their hard work—it looks like it’s really paying off.
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Chris on Mon Jun 11 at 04:00AM
Thanks for the post ;-) We’ve really tried hard to improve the interface in the latest release – just looking at v0.1.0 shows just how far it’s come. Even v0.3.3 is ugly compared to the new interface.
Our goal is to make content management simple, so most of our time is spent in usability. I just recently ran StatSVN on our project, and the results sort of prove this: the largest directory of code is the javascripts directory at 23%. Second is CSS, and then the models at a distant third. Granted, the core Javascripts account for a bulk of the 23%, but more CSS than models?! Pretty insane ;-)
Oh, and if you’re curious, here are the full stats
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Ryan on Mon Jun 11 at 04:33AM
On the assumption that most days are forward progress, it’s interesting to see the places where you’ve lessened the LOC—I’m guessing due to refactoring. About the javascript and CSS, you can really tell there’s a ton of effort there.
For me (and maybe most people are like this) to keep motivation on a project, I need all parts, big and small, to not be rushed. I like knowing what I’ve done so far was built with quality. Once I have to rush (to meet deadlines, or whatever), I start caring less and less. “Well, this is already junked up because of [...], what’s one more [...]?”
I think the interface/design changes you guys have made from earlier versions has improved slate ten fold. The truth of the matter is, CSS and interface things do matter, and should be given just as much (or more) attention as the functionality. I’ve never used slate, and just by looking at screen shots I can tell it’s a user-friendly, well-built system.
I’m just curious—do you guys (meaning you and Dave) do the interface/CSS stuff, too, in addition to the javascript and code?
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Chris on Mon Jun 11 at 05:00AM
I do all the CSS, either from scratch or building on what Dave has done. This latest release looks an awful lot like Basecamp, and that was intentional to an extent. I wanted to the interface to feel like “Basecamp for content”. My end goal was not to copy what they’d done simply because it was cool or something, but rather that I had a need for a two-column design. Further, I needed to restyle the header because it was clunky with those site tabs.
Regarding the Javascript – most of that is actually Dave’s doing. In fact, our snippet interface is run almost entirely via his Javascript, which improves the response quite a bit. Previously, clicking ‘Insert’ for a snippet would cause another AJAX request to “compile” the parameters into snippet code – now, that is done via Javascript.
I guess my stats from before have actually changed – it’s no longer 23% for JS. I removed some pieces from the stats generation, so the numbers are all different.
BTW – You should throw together a simple design sometime, and then you can try out slate. It would be good to have another tester :-)
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Dave on Mon Jun 11 at 06:05AM
+1 to the idea of getting you a test account. Just need a reasonable design. I actually think this one would work sans the categories. You’d get a better feel for the system if you tried to copy something rather then some throw away simple design.
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Ryan on Mon Jun 11 at 07:40AM
I have a lot going on right now, but I’d love to have a test account. That would be good for me to really understand the benefits of slate. As one could imagine, there are several pieces to slate that I don’t quite get. Mostly just the flow of things, and what sites are good to be deployed using slate. After all, there’s only so much you can piece together from screen shots.
So what are the prerequisites? When you say “reasonable design,” what exactly does that mean? More of an idea/components for a site? If you’re serious about me copying my site, that would work for me. I think I agree using something I’m somewhat familiar with.
If the test account is something you would want/need immediate feedback on, maybe I should wait until I have more time. But if it’s not a big deal to add another test account, that would be great.
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Chris on Mon Jun 11 at 07:52AM
Using this site design will work just fine. Essentially, all I would really need is a couple of HTML templates. For standard websites this usually means index.rhtml and backpage.rhtml. For blogs you could either try to style the shared templates that we use, or create custom ones. If you go the custom route (easier for you because you won’t have to change the CSS) then just drop in comment lines for where the dynamic stuff should happen (article name, tags, etc).