Zoundry Raven: Multiple Blogs

One of the challenges we face when designing Raven is how we satisfactorily handle posting to multiple blogs. One of the features of Raven (and Zoundry Blog Writer as well) is the ability to publish the same blog entry to multiple blogs. Our internal data model supports this, but we have struggled to come up with a user interface design that really works. At the same time, we recognize that most of our users will never use this feature. So the challenge becomes designing a user interface that elegantly allows the user to publish to multiple blogs, but doesn't clutter up the interface when not being used.

With Zoundry Raven I think we have started to make some good strides in this direction. When a blog post is being composed, Raven allows the user to configure the publishing settings. The idea is to treat the publishing settings as more tightly coupled with the blog post than it was in Zoundry Blog Writer 1.0. The internal data model hasn't really changed much, only the user interface. I think some screen shots are in order.

First, the user must choose a blog. The combo box that pops up makes it easy to find the blog in question. It even includes filtering capabilities for those users with a lot of blogs/accounts (again, we are trying to build a UI that works for light users and power users). Once the blog is selected, the user can configure the publishing meta data by clicking on the associated "Configure..." drop-down. What this screen shot does not show, but I think you can easily imagine, is what happens when the user wants to publish to multiple blogs. We will be adding some sort of little + or "more" button that will add an additional blog drop down. The user will be able to add as many blogs as necessary.

For each blog selected, the user must configure the publishing information. As mentioned, this is done by clicking the "Configure..." drop-down associated with each Blog drop-down. The "Configure..." drop-down will let the user configure various publishing meta information, such as the post date, draft, categories, trackbacks, etc. It's still a bit unclear exactly what data will go in here, but I think it gives you a pretty good idea of where we are headed. Publishing meta information can actually get pretty complex, but I think this is a pretty decent way of getting all of that information out of the way. The idea being that, when editing a blog post, the user is primarily concerned with editing the actual content. To that end, we have tried to minimize the vertical space take up by the blog post's meta data (blogs, title, tagwords, etc).

There are a couple other things to note. First, when authoring a new post, the default settings for the publishing information will be inherited based on account and/or blog specific settings. For instance, the user will be able to set a default value for the "Upload only thumbnail images" option which can be configured at the Blog level or at the Account level. That way, frequent publishing options can be configured once rather than having to specify them for each new post.

Second, any changes made to publishing options will be saved with the blog post even if the post is not yet published. It would really be a pain if that information was lost just because the user wanted to work on the post later.

If anyone has any thoughts on what other ways we could improve the UI, we are more than happy to hear from you. Just comment here on the blog or post to the forum.

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