Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Feature of the Week: Next Week's release

In the past weeks we were busy implementing BibSonomy's new look we announced in December. In this post we present a preview of the new layout you will experience from the next week on. Let's start with a screenshot of the start page for logged-in users:

As you can see: the general layout is the same: at the top the blue navigation and search bar, to the right the sidebar and to the left the bookmark and publication lists. The most obvious change are probably the new icons on the left of each post:

They show the type of the bookmarked publication, in this case a conference talk ("inproceedings"). In case you have uploaded a document to the post, its preview is shown on some pages (user and group pages). For bookmarks we plan to add screenshots (a student is already working on this). The yellow "sash" highlights your own posts. If you hover with the mouse over a post, it is highlighted by a yellow background and the new action icons appear that allow you to pick the post for the clipboard (formerly "basket"), edit, or delete it.

Actions you can do with all posts on the page are now all accessible at the top gear of each list:


Just hover with the mouse over the gear and you can access the options to export and sort your posts, pick or edit them. Another new menu can be found at the top of the sidebar:

This menu allows you to quickly access some unique features of BibSonomy. The first two icons guide you to your inbox and your clipboard (formerly "basket") and show how many posts they contain. With the next icon you can access your spheres, the edit tags page, your settings, this blog, and the help.

We hope that you will like the new layout and forgive us possible bugs that you will certainly find. Until then we try to decrease your chance of finding a bug by intensively testing the new layout.

Happy bookmarking!