Editing articles in a modal popup

After finally completing editing of titles at the frontend ( there maybe a few minute bugs ), I’m now close to completing my second milestone i.e. editing of articles at the frontend in a modal popup.

You can go and try the demo here -> http://ankitahuja.com/playground/joomla . Just click on the edit icons next to the article titles and you will be able to perform the editing. It might behave a little weird in IE.

The key issues I’m keeping in mind while enhancing the user interface for article editing at the frontend are the following:

1. Consistent Look: According to me, its important for an editor to have a consistent look. As of now in Joomla!, the editor UI at the frontend depends a lot upon the template that the user has. I think having a consistent look regardless of the template makes it easier for the users to relate to the editor when they have different sites to deal with or even otherwise makes it look better and more fun to use. I’ve to tried to meet this objective to some extent.

2. Tabbed interface: Scrollbar doesn’t look nice in a modal popup and it is not very user friendly. So, I’m going to try using a tabbed interface where the user can easily switch between editing the article, setting the publishing settings and changing the meta data instead of scrolling down and then scrolling back up to save the article. I will be implementing this in the coming week.

3. NO Refresh: This is one of the coolest things that I’ve been able to implement. When you save your article, the page will not be refreshed. Instead, the article’s content will be updated in place. This means you don’t have to wait for your page to refresh to see the changes that you made.

4. Modal popup does not close on a background click: This is a simple usability issue. You don’t want to click accidently anywhere in the background and lose all your changes. You can press the ‘Esc’ key, click the close button or click the close icon on the top right to close the popup.

Article editing is still buggy and I would be fixing the bugs in the coming week as well as adding the tabbed interface. I would also try to begin with editing of module parameters in a modal popup.

Now that my exams are coming to a close, I’m glad that I would be able to concentrate solely on the project!

If you have any suggestions/feedback/ideas/criticism, I would absolutely love it. So, feel free to comment.