Kelli Shaver

11 months ago

Yet another round of updates to Happy Docs

This is what, the third update in a week?

Tonight I added some features, refined some existing functionality, and did a fairly substantial amount of clean-up to the Happy Docs interface.

Updates include:

1. Published/Unpublished Status for Pages & Resources - Now you can save resources and pages as drafts. Drafts aren’t visible in the public documentation or export formats and are clearly marked as drafts when viewed by contributors.
2. Changes in the way resource duplication works - You now duplicate resources from the resource list, rather than ticking a check box on the resource edit screen (we lost too much work because we would forget to check this). Duplicating a single resource will drop you right into the edit screen for that resource. Duplicating several will return you to the list, with each duplicated resource status set to ‘draft’.
3. Edit, Duplicate, and Test links right in the pages / resources lists - Now there’s no need to drill down to a page or resource view just to click an edit link or test a resource in the Query Tool - just click the icon in the list view.
4. Better Breadcrumbs - Breadcrumb navigation is now more consistently shown throughout the application, making it easier to navigate projects.
5. More UI Clean-Up - The system as a whole, and in particular the application overview page has undergone a bit of a facelift. Headings have been cleaned up, icons added, button placement made more consistent, and some the overall UI is a bit more refined and makes better use of the screen space available.

Here’s a shot of the new application overview page:

That’s it for now. Future plans include keyboard shortcuts for navigation activity logging for authors, cleaning up the public profile pages, caching PDF output, and possibly file attachments. I’m going to step back and go through the code I have now before adding many more features, though. I need to do some refactoring and clean-up on the back end. There’s a bit of redundancy in places where things could be more DRY. I want to keep the code as light as possible.