Wikiup Entity Editor Mockups
Here are a set of very rough mock-ups for the Wikiup Entity Editor (WEE). The WEE is the proposed front-end Flex-based tool for editing content.
These sketches represent the editing portion of the tool. There’s also an Entity Explorer (accessed by the “W” button in the upper left corner of each screen), but we’ll deal with that separately.
General Orientation and Top Matter
The editor deals with editing, discussing and rating any individual Class within the Wikiup (a Roman Centurion, a maze, a leopard, a sword, a football pitch). As you can see, the bulk of the screen is occupied by a tabbed interface, with each tab responsible for a portion of interface.
The big buttons at the top of every screen are the common controls: The ‘W’ button to get to the Entity Explorer, a preferences button, a help button, and a big, friendly Post! button to post your entry. I’m thinking now there should be a “Save Draft” button also. There’s also some common info. The name of the class (fixed from birth), and the unique ID, the version number, the rating and the author of the current entry.
Basic Screen
This screen covers simple detail: information useful to humans for the purpose of comprehension, though largely irrelevant to a computer. The inheritance chain (how this Class inherits its traits) is displayed, as are a desription and folksonomic tags. Images may optionally be attached for visual reference.
A simple style dropdown allows the choice of a few tags (headline, body, list) in the description area.
Properties Screen
Here’s where most of the hard work happens. Properties, abilities and possessions of the Class are laid out inside an accordion component. Note that each item in the inheritance chain provides its own set of properties, so an author can easily see where a given property derives from. Though not shown here, the bottom item in any inheritence chain will need the ability to add new properties, abilities and possessions.
Discuss Screen
As in Wikipedia, a place to discuss the issues which arrive from a given entry. As with description, a simple style dropdown allows the choice of a few tags (headline, list, body, signature).
Rate Screen
As the name states, a place to rate the entry, but also to flag abusive behaviour and identify versions which you personally like. A given user can only tag one version of any class: this is the version that user “prefers”. If a client game chooses to filter based on a given user’s preference, this is the version they will receive.
XML Screen
Just the XML feed, as a client game would receive it. I have a notion that there are two versions of this feed: OO and concise. The OO form retains the Object Oriented structure, for facilitating editors like this one, while the concise form is more suited to games, where knowing the values is more important than determining how we arrived at them.
History Screen
The version history of this Class. A user can organise the versions by author, date, version or rating. Selecting a different version makes that version current, and any edits for new versions (as well as ratings, tags, etc.) will focus on the selected version.