Fluid and Segue: Common Ground

[Nate Angell]

Hadn't heard of Seque before...sounds interesting.

Wondering if you all have looked at Drupal and the drupaled  
distribution of Drupal, which offers many of the same functions in the  
context of a more general content management system/web application  
toolkit, along with substantial maturity (now on version 6) and a  
vibrant community of 1000s worldwide (over 2000 people are attending  
DrupalCon in Boston as I write).
http://drupal.org/
http://www.drupaled.org/
http://boston2008.drupalcon.org/

The following Drupal modules may be of interest in thinking about  
patterns for customizable layouts:

Views
http://drupal.org/project/views

Panels (esp Panels 2, which is in beta)
http://drupal.org/project/panels

I certainly celebrate every project, including Segue, but as with  
Moodle, I sometimes wonder if those of us committed to working on  
technology for education, especially within specific technology  
stacks, might not use our resources better by consolidating our  
efforts on a single platform rather than having to reinvent so many  
wheels and spread our energy across so many communities. If someone  
else is already tackling the sophisticated feed or authentication or  
tagging or whatever mechanisms, then we can focus on some of the parts  
dear to education that may be missing, like IMS portability, tests &  
quizzes, eportfolios, etc.

That's one thing I like about the Fluid mission, as it seeks to  
consolidate AND disseminate already-invented wheels.

On Mar 5, 2008, at 1:48 PM, Alex Chapin wrote:

> Hello all,
> I'm Alex Chapin, a curricular technologist from Middlebury College who
> has just recently heard about the Fluid project.  I am one of the
> developers of Segue,  a "curricular content management system," which
> won a 2007 Mellon Award for Technology Collaboration.
>
> We are currently working on a new version of Segue, which will be
> based on a completely new codebase.  We hope Segue v2 will have
> feature parity with the current version of Segue (1.8.x) by the fall
> of this year.  My colleague, Adam Franco who is our technical lead,
> and I recently talked with Colin about Fluid and our work and
> discovered we had a lot in common.
>
> Segue v2 is built on top of Harmoni, a service-oriented application
> framework we created that includes implementations of the Open
> Knowledge Initiative (O.K.I.) open service interface definitions
> (OSIDs).  To help ease the transition from Segue 1x to Segue v2, we
> have created two UI's, a classic mode which replicates the current
> version of Segue and a "new" mode that takes advantage of additional
> functionality available only in the new version.  We have architect-ed
> this in a way that allows us to add any number of additional UI's and
> let users switch from one UI to another on-the-fly.
>
> One of the most challenging UI's in Segue v2 is our arrange mode.
> This mode allows users to reorder content in a given "view" of a site
> by means of a drag and drop interface, much like your proposed Fluid
> Module Layout Tool (was comforted to know we aren't the only ones
> struggling to find names for these things...).  A Segue site basically
> consists of containers for layout, content and menus.  Users can
> specify the number of rows and columns in a given layout container and
> can then add to that containers for menus and content.
>
> Users then specify the number of rows and columns for each content
> container, as well as other settings such as sort order and "index
> direction."  If a given content container "contains" blog posts, then
> it may be best configured to be sorted in reverse chronological order
> with 1 column and perhaps 10 rows (posts beyond 10 will be paginated
> within that container).  If the content container will "contain" a set
> of thumbnail images, then these may be best displayed in 3-4 columns
> and rows in "custom" order (that can be reordered via drag and drop).
> Menu containers (maybe navigation container is better...) also have
> settings for "index direction" to allow for horizontal or vertical
> arrangement of navigation. As well, sub-menus (sub-navigation) can be
> created for any nav item (menu item).
>
> Segue's "arrange" mode (maybe "organize" is better...) really allows
> users to re-order, re-arrange and re-organize "content blocks",
> "content containers", "layout containers", "menu containers" and "nav
> items" as well as their sort order and direction of "flow."  We would
> love to find a way to simplify all this if possible or at least
> clarify it.  Currently we are compiling a list of "information
> architecture" design patterns that demonstrate different ways a Segue
> v2 site can be laid out and organized, see:
> https://segue2.middlebury.edu/ui1/view/site/achapin-templates01
>
> We have implementations of other UI components that may be of interest
> to the Fluid community including UI's for pagination, versioning,
> wizards and tagging.  We have done our best to keep these as
> encapsulated as possible so that at least we can reuse them.  That
> said, we would be happy to share this work or swap out what we have
> done for better, more standardized implementations that are more
> accessible to assistive technologies.  We're also interested in mobile
> UIs, do a lot of work with RSS feeds of audio and video and would like
> to create versions of our apps optimized for mobile devices.
>
> Hope that wasn't too long winded!  Looking forward to learning more
> about Fluid.
>
> Alex
>
> Alex Chapin
> Principal Curricular Technologist
> Middlebury College
>
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