Deuce

Screenshot

History

Deuce was first put together as a proof of concept as a replacement to replace the default Ace skin in May of 2007. With limited development resources, it was placed on the backburner, but finally was able to be released as a beta skin in MindTouch Deki Lyons (9.02).

Authors

RoyK, GuerricS

Intent

Deuce is meant to be a tightly controlled skin - unlike the highly customizable Fiesta, Deuce does not offer custom areas in this release. Going into the future, the skin will need to be cleaned up to take advantage of our CSS variables so creating more themes is simpler. Once that is complete, and cross-browser stability is achieved, custom areas will be added into Deuce.

For users that wish to add custom areas themselves to Deuce, simply look in Fiesta for how to add custom areas. (TODO: Somebody provide some better instructions, please?)

Some UI notes

From a UI standpoint, this skin can be considered a descendent of Ace. Structurally, it shares a lot of common themes from Ace (user information in top right, a clear separation of page/site level tools).

With so many additional features added to MindTouch in the previous couple of releases, it was important to pick and choose which features to emphasize. Ace was heavily influenced by the Hayes release, and hadn't received much additional treatment since then.

In Ace, we exposed three top-level page-level tools: "Edit page", "New page", and "Print page", but in Deuce, there are only two options (Bubble 1). Rather than forcing people to click twice ("Print page", then click the button "Print page"), Deuce forces users to rely on the browser's internal print function. With the advent of the fantastic PDF printing in MindTouch and DekiScript, it was also possible to exert more editorial control over the content - which removed the necessity of adding UI tools ("Show/hide Table of Contents"). Yay for simplification!

One of our more important features in the Jay Cooke release (todo: verify) that have always been buried in all skins - Talk pages. Because a lot of our customers are using talk pages as places to allow for free-form discussion (and then moderating content on the main pages), it was clear there talk pages needed to be featured more prominently. (Bubble 2). The UI flow for going between talk pages and the main pages is much smoother, and there are more visual indicators for when you are on a talk page.

MindTouch has always linked to the page version history through the date - this has been consistent in Ace and Fiesta. However, we were still getting questions on how to discover page history - Deuce now explicitly links to Page History to ease discovery of this tool.

Besides these subtle pagebar changes, we've also spent a lot of time on the content styles - making sure that there is proper spacing and grouping between content and headers.

Please leave your feedback for this skin in the comments below!