Stories are coming along just fine

Yesterday I spent a few hours with the Stories Database, and it is turning out pretty good if I may say so myself. The layout for the featured stories front page is pretty much done, and now I have to recreate that for the listings and then clean things up a bit. I also need to set a bit of strategies and of course clean things up. For the strategies I will use Confluence for documenting, at least for now until I have a plan for how to move this to this site. For cleaning things up, well…that will just be a ton of work to go back and update everything, but that was always the way things had to be.

Structure of Stories

This is by far the biggest task right now as information structure must be simple, but still make it easy to find the information you are interested in. Right now there are a lot of categories, and I am going to work with that to see what the best solution is from a UX and SEO perspective. I will probably make a few tests to see if there is a way to improve on this as I get more people trying involved.

The biggest work will also be to ensure that all products and companies have a Tag, so I can connect all Stories properly. Considering the amount of these that exists, this will be a continuous work as I can’t add the thousands of tags up front.

Pictogram CSS

I see that I will want to use pictograms for all the Atlassian products in various places, and I am going to create a new CSS for just that purpose. As I am using Font Awesome I have been playing around with the custom icons and I will update those with the official logos so it is easy to use. You can see that I have already added a few of these on the Stories listing, so I will just refactor this and create a new CSS file for this.

One issue I have is that I have a bit of a problem with setting the class name based on the Category name as it contain spaces in some cases and the names are not the same across databases. If there was a way to add a custom field to the categories, this would not be an issue, but for now I have to map the category ID to each class, which is a time-consuming activity.

I keep working on this, but I will begin with adding it to Stories first and it will be super simple.

/*** Jira ***/
.jwsea_newsHeader_logo_703:after{
  content: "\e010";
}

Simplify and create a new form

Adding stories should be super easy and to make it, so I will create a new Form for Stories. This form will work like the old ones where I use tabs and collapsible areas to make the initial form view super easy to use, but with options if needed. Currently, there are so many fields that I will go over and review. I want to make things as simple as possible and then extend when it is actually needed rather than bloat things and make things feel more complicated than it is.

This will be the first form I recreate, and I will create a new CSS for Forms as well where I have the forms styles to be re-used for other Forms. I might also create a JS file or two as well if needed.

Stories will be my focus for now

Stories is the main focus at the moment, and it will be my focus for the next week or so. I am having a ton of fun building things again, but I also have a ton of clean up to do as well as saving the old code, so I can reuse some of it for future projects.