Page mockups

Oh, and on the top bar. The "People" link would jump to a page with a big search bar, a list of "popular" people, and a listing of every surname on the site.

The pictures page would jump to some sort of interface for browsing pictures perhaps sorted by date, by family, or something else. This can wait for awhile.

The other content has a drop down with each content type that people can click on to go to and browse.

Front page

@David -- isn't your "top person" block idea essentially what the person slideshow is? It wasn't clear perhaps from the sketch but the slideshow would be rotating through different people w/ auto-selected content about that person (e.g. their autobiography, or stories about them etc.). @Ben I like your idea of auto-populating the list of people to rotate through rather than selecting them. That's more impartial and easier for us and definitely easier for others to use.

Person Page

@David By timeline I mean something like http://www.simile-widgets.org/timeline/ (the drupal module http://drupal.org/project/timeline). By map, I mean create a map with the different events in the person's life mapped. So where they were born, died, where married, etc. So say you have someone born in the old world and then emigrated, on the map you'd be able to see quickly where these different places where. Both provide alternative way of visualizing a person's life and I've seen them used on other genealogical sites rather successfully.

I ran out of room at the bottom which is why I didn't sketch anything for the rest of the content but my idea was that for each content type associated with the person there'd be another section linking to the stories, autobiographies, etc.

Content page

@David, I didn't think of adding a bio for the primary people until the end so it's squeezed in at the top of the right hand column. George Black is the example primary person. @Ben the bio would be auto generated. I'm thinking something as simple as their name, a picture (if available) and when they were born/died.

@David, I agree that there's no point at putting an arbitrary limit on primary people. As long as it's very clear in the descriptions for the fields what a primary person is and what a mentioned person is.

@David if you set the allowed number of fields to unlimited, on the node edit form Drupal will show 3 fields and have an "add additional field" button there to add more. So we don't have to worry about a long list of empty fields.

@Ben I agree some content does need titles like the stories example you mentioned. Others like the gravesite content type would definitely not need a human-generated title. So we'll have to look at the different content types and decide which need a title and which don't.

If you guys could clone https://github.com/KyleAMathews/Family-History-distro-HTML-mockup and comment on the frontpage/person/content mockups that would be much appreciated. I'm most happy about the front page and content mockups. The person page I think needs more work. You should be able to click around just fine from the index.html page.

I've redone the front page blocks per your suggestion David and like the change. Tell me what you think there.

You didn't mention what you thought about the sample person page. I revamped some things there as well.

Also, on the autobiography page, my Mom pointed out that you'd want to reference people who aren't are relatives. So I added John Taylor as an example. I think there'll need to be two fields. One for the person's name (auto complete on people on database but also allow free entry of other names) and one for the relationship to the main people (e.g. George's daughter).

One other thing. Beth was complaining things looked "boring" which sparked the thought that we're in 2010 and can use more than 5 fonts on the web. So I went off to http://code.google.com/webfonts and with my Mom picked out IM Fell. The H1s have been converted to use that.

Also, if you want to play with free fonts, http://www.fontsquirrel.com/ is another good source.

The square boxes are photos. Traditional newsprint mockups use boxes w/ a cross to indicate photos but I didn't know how to do that with CSS so just did boxes. My inspiration for that particular bit of the layout was the new Facebook profile which looks somewhat similar.

The marriage line is blue because the css classes I imported from Blueprint (http://www.blueprintcss.org/tests/parts/elements.html) automatically add stripes to every other table row which is considered a best practice as it makes it easier to read across long table rows -- see http://www.alistapart.com/d/stripedtables/comparison.html

Yes, the gravestone column would only show up if there's actually items.

My idea is "John Taylor" type links would go to a person-lite page that would show (like regular person pages) every content that's linked there. Which would be pretty interesting for people like Joseph Smith which a lot of converts would of mentioned. We could see there which of all our ancestors mentioned Joseph Smith or other church leaders. This will be a bit tricky to handle technically. Perhaps the easiest thing to do would be to just treat them as regular Person entities but not add more additional information than needed. So for Joseph Smith we could perhaps add a photo and some basic info about who he is but most other people that are mentioned (say the gentlemen that ordained George an Elder) there'd be nothing on their pages other than their names + the (probably) one page that links to them.

Individual places would have their own place as well -- so we could see every event/content associated with Antimony Utah. The "Map of places" link would open up a new page with a map with pins on each place mentioned on that page/content.

This isn't an active discussion anymore as work has shifted from mockups to building the actual product. Marking fixed.