Sidebar UI

[tanius]

A new attempt to discuss and implement a sidebar user interface for Open Ethnographer (after #15 and #32). The last state of discussion is that it should not contain individual annotations, which are in the main text already, and also not the quotation manager, which is better suited for more spacy taxonomy term pages where it lives now. However, the sidebar is intended to contain some or all of the following:

• Choosing which tags to show. Dealt with in Showing / hiding others' public tags in viewed text #25, which see.
• Editing tag properties. That is, name and descriptions so far. Can be done for example via "Edit" links in the list of tags that can be switched on and off (see above).
• Exporting tags. First a simple button to export all own annotations to RQDA, plus later a form to select by OG group which content to include (see Allow to select which content to include in an export #20) and later an upload field to allow updating an existing RQDA file (issue Incremental export to RQDA #19).
• Merging tags. Merging two tags into one is seemingly frequently needed by researchers during coding work. It is a tag-level operation, so is best suited within the tag list. Maybe even using drag&drop.
• Forking tags. Forking a tag is a tag-level operation, so is best placed alongside the show/hide tag-level operation in its own column.
• Collaboration tab. Strictly, forking is also about collaboration, but while forking is about "branching off", this tab would be about "raking in" others' additions and changes, incorporating them in ones own work where relevant. It could for example be a list of "annotations you have not seen", showing all new public annotations added by other researchers to nodes / comments oneself has also commented on, if created after one has last worked on the specific node or comment. The researcher can then walk through this list and mark items as "read", after acting on it for example by forking a newly created tag, adding an annotation with an existing or new own tag, adding a comment, or doing nothing at all.
• Coding progress manager. Dealt with in Coding progress manager #49, and meant for the more remote future.

The basic implementation for an 1.0 release would be: editing tag properties, a list of tags with the ability to switch their visibility, and the export button (without #19 or #20). (Merging can be provided via tagadelic in the meantime, and forking and collaboration are only relevant once we have private tags for true multi-user use.)

[tanius]

Since the sidebar is going to be mostly a tag manager, and not an annotation / quotation manager, it does not not need much of a direct integration with Annotator. (Edit: Switching annotation visibility by tag needs some interaction with Annotator though.)

So, maybe we should not make this an Annotator plugin, which would happen if basing it on the annotator_view plugin. Instead, we might better make this into a normal Drupal module. It would then be the main part of a future Drupal module openethnographer, which would depend on the annotator and annotation Drupal modules for most of the other components which we'll contribute upstream.

Opinions, @danohuiginn? (Also, did you start with the new sidebar already, or if not, do you want to take this over? Depends on your available time obviously.)

[tanius]

Whoever will implement this should have a look at term_merge. It allows merging tags, which Drupal Core does not support. So its backend function for merging could simply be called when merging in the sidebar UI, a type of integration also done by taxonomy_manager, which see as an example.

Note that we already have term_merge integration via e5ae01f, just not an own UI to trigger this. Also, taxonomy manager could have some moew backend goodies and example code that would benefit this sidebar UI feature.

Update: Corrected the module names. It's not tagadelic, but term_merge and taxonomy_manager.

[tanius]

Assigning to @danohuiginn since you agreed today to work on this :) So, it's yours.

[tanius]

Corrected my comment above with hints to useful code, also mentioning the term_merge integration that I added.

[tanius]

How are thinks going, @danohuiginn? Do you have an approx. date when you can finish this feature?