Improve Publishing flow (PART 1)

Problem

Users are really lost when it comes to publishing content into the System. We need to make sure users understand better what is happening and what are the posibilities of publishing in the system.

Solution

First we need to explain what "Publishing" means:

Publishing is announce Publications to the network

The only way other can read your content in the system is by you signing it and make it available in the network. this is the first and required step to share content and make it available to others.

Publishing is including documents to groups

After we have a new version for the published document (or any publication version published in the past) then we can decide to include it as part of the content of a group. This means create a new version of that group woth the new document assigning a pathname to it.

If the group is published to a site (has a domain) then we can suggest an extra sub-step which is push the new version group to the site.

Publishing is including documents in the main outline of your account or a group

Because Account and Group entities have now Home documents, we open a new publishing posibility that means embed content/publications inside this Home documents. While this can be done the same way we embed content in any other document, we created some facilities to manage the content on this special documents.

When we are talking about adding content to a specific location in a group home page, the embedded document does not have to be published into the group (whith its own pathname), but I believe is recommended since this will encourage in-page navigation when you are consuming content on a site.

Publishing flows

With this Publishing definitions in mind. we can define the 4 ways we currently can let users publish content into the sytem:

New draft from scratch

Editting a existing published document

Create a new Page from the sidebar outline

Add a document to a Location

New draft from scratch

This flow starts when the user clicks the "Create" button at the titlebar.

While editing (draft mode) the user will see a "Publish" button. This publish button will convert the draft into a publication ready to be shared in the network. After this succeeds, then we show a confirmation dialog in which we let the user decide the next action:

Publish to a group: This will let hte user select from the list of groups he or she is allow to publish to. Also it will met the user edit the pathname that will be stores in this group.

Move to a Location: Here we will present the groups or own account home page the user can edit, and list the sections for the selected home page to which the document will be added. Here we might also let the user select how this document will be added into: Content embed, card embed or Heading embed.

Copy the URL to share it on social media: because the document is already published, we can copy the URL of the document based on the gateway setup in the app. If the user wants a site URL, then it must publish the document first to the group.

If the user starts a new draft with a particular Route context (pressed new draft while navigating inside a group he or she is a editor), then we can store this information so after the user publishes the document we can suggest this same location to publish to.

Editting a existing published document

The flow when editing a document is very similar to the draft from scratch, the only difference is that we must take in consideration the current Route context in which the user was before editing. this will be handy to suggest a more accurate publishing experience to the user since we assume the place in which the user wants to publish is where it was before editing.

Create a new Page from the sidebar outline

This workflow enable users create documents right from the sidebar outline. Every section heading will have a button to "add a new page to this section". This will create a new draft storing this location, so after the user publishes, we can suggest the user to add the document to the position it was selected.

We might just avoid showing the Publish confirmation dialog in this cases, since the intent to add the document was determined before the user started editing the draft.

Add a document to a location

This workflow can be triggered from any document visible in the main panel. When this option is selected, we can either make it all the interaction to happen inside a dialog, or even better, add a checkbox/radio button to every section in the sidebar so the user can select the section and the document will be added to it. This will navigate the user to the draft state of the current home page displayed in the sidebar.

Scope

2 weeks. The main interactions could be done in 1 week, but we need some period of testing to make sure everything works as expected.

Rabbit Holes

We need to show the information about where a document was published to. We can either have this information inside the versions panel or maybe accessible in the dialog panel for each publication.

We are not sure if showing all this metadata info about locations of a document will make the reading experience more cluttered. we need to be careful with that.