Ahm - we don't have Ribbon and never will have. It's a UI structure for very complex applications - for background read the blog posts by Jensen Harris from Microsoft.
To put it short, you should never, ever have to implement the Ribbon as it's a symptom of an application that got out of control.
Ahm - "Umbraco" Do have a toolbar that is segmented (almost tabbed) - "In GUI-based application software, a ribbon is an interface where a set of toolbars are placed on tabs in a tab bar."
So what I actually mean with current ribbon is the "LiveEditingToolbar" - feature
Rephrased: The live editing toolbar could be ribbon:ified
I can concur with for most scenarios that a ribbon can be overkilll
UX pattern ribbon says for ex: "You have many capabilities to expose—the ribbon can be overkill in simpler situations."
However: a ribbon gives the opportunity to group, and contextually expose toolbar feature as well.
If one don't need the ribbon-features (just 1 long toolbar, fine it can be implemented with ribbon; but if one DO need the grouping feature, say for example one would like to fully expose the tinyMCE options one could load it into a sepparate tab.
It was just a suggestion, so if "should never" mentality is prevalent, forget that I suggested this at all...
It's not that there's a general should never mentality, but simply that we should focus on making smarter solutions rather than hiding bad choices in advanced UI patterns.
A good example of this is the way we've chosen to limit the options in tinyMCE for the end user by combining font, font-size and colors into one single editable style dropdown. Not only will this end with cleaner and more semantic markup and make users follow design guidelines but at the same time it means that there's one tinymce dropdown instead of five options. And I don't believe that the live editing toolbar is segmented enough to need a Ribbon.
I think that the way the Ribbon is implemented in Office is wise. Luckily we're not Office and a great side effect of this is that we don't have to deal with a UI pattern that can handle a ton of options.
As long as there's different people, there'll be different oppinoins. Some prefer systems that wins a feature matrix fight, others love more simple tools.
That's why it's wonderful to live in a world where there'll always be different choices.
New ribbon suggestion
Suggestion:
Replace default ribbon with JQuery ribbon jqueryribbon on codeplex
Ahm - we don't have Ribbon and never will have. It's a UI structure for very complex applications - for background read the blog posts by Jensen Harris from Microsoft.
To put it short, you should never, ever have to implement the Ribbon as it's a symptom of an application that got out of control.
Ahm - "Umbraco" Do have a toolbar that is segmented (almost tabbed)
- "In GUI-based application software, a ribbon is an interface where a set of toolbars are placed on tabs in a tab bar."
So what I actually mean with current ribbon is the "LiveEditingToolbar" - feature
Rephrased:
The live editing toolbar could be ribbon:ified
I can concur with for most scenarios that a ribbon can be overkilll
UX pattern ribbon says for ex: "You have many capabilities to expose—the ribbon can be overkill in simpler situations."
However: a ribbon gives the opportunity to group, and contextually expose toolbar feature as well.
If one don't need the ribbon-features (just 1 long toolbar, fine it can be implemented with ribbon; but if one DO need the grouping feature,
say for example one would like to fully expose the tinyMCE options one could load it into a sepparate tab.
It was just a suggestion, so if "should never" mentality is prevalent, forget that I suggested this at all...
Giving editors access to the full tinymce options scares me! It always ends up with your carefully designed site looking like geocities circa 1996 ;-)
Thanks for the jquery ribbon link, bookmarked.
It's not that there's a general should never mentality, but simply that we should focus on making smarter solutions rather than hiding bad choices in advanced UI patterns.
A good example of this is the way we've chosen to limit the options in tinyMCE for the end user by combining font, font-size and colors into one single editable style dropdown. Not only will this end with cleaner and more semantic markup and make users follow design guidelines but at the same time it means that there's one tinymce dropdown instead of five options. And I don't believe that the live editing toolbar is segmented enough to need a Ribbon.
I think that the way the Ribbon is implemented in Office is wise. Luckily we're not Office and a great side effect of this is that we don't have to deal with a UI pattern that can handle a ton of options.
Supposedly someone else thought it to be "a focus on making a smarter solution"...
http://blog.created.dk/post/Sitecore-vs-Umbraco-e28093-Part-1.aspx
As long as there's different people, there'll be different oppinoins. Some prefer systems that wins a feature matrix fight, others love more simple tools.
That's why it's wonderful to live in a world where there'll always be different choices.
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