Mathieu Plourde's Mockup for Content Authoring

Here is a mockup I came up with in Paris. A new, more complete mockup is available here: http://bugs.sakaiproject.org/confluence/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=41222545

The idea is to have access to an unstructured authoring environment in which you could drag and drop synoptic views (widgets) pointing to specifics entities (an assignment, a discussion topic, a wiki page, a quiz, etc.). If we could create an entity on the fly, that would be even better.

Following Josh Ryan's question about the way the sidebar should look like, especially when showing a lot of resources, I would envision something like the Dreamweaver side bar. Only one site's entities would show up (the current by default, but someone could switch to another one). Each tool would have its own section that could be reduced, expanded, dragged to change the order, etc. We would need some grip zones where users would know they can click to drag and drop, some sort of texture that becomes a handle. Nathan has already addressed this challenge in his design, so we could reuse what he did already.

Some alternative ideas:

• Nathan suggested to add a Insert button and use his Lightbox behavior instead.
• Michael suggested a way to change the options of a dropped-in entity (countdown, link, thumbnail, summary, etc.).
• Mathieu suggested to add a way to save a default entity behavior and to add an Options link to each entity to change its settings.
• The WYSIWYG editor should also be customized to work in the wiki tool too, respecting the wiki's formatting capabilities.

Silos are good for farmers, not for Sakai