Maybe you've heard that Daily Kos was building a new version of the software that powers the site. Maybe you heard and forgot—I understand: It's been a long time coming. But I sincerely believe it will be worth the wait. We have rewritten and redesigned all the code behind the front page, the story page, the story authoring tool, and comments. The new version of these tools is the next step in the evolution of Daily Kos' platform, an evolution that has now been ongoing for an amazing 13 years.
Our design goal was to refine the visual and functional aspects of the site to make the existing features a better fit for all the different types of Daily Kos users, from occasional visitors to power-user diehards. Special emphasis has been placed on making Daily Kos legible, consistent, and friendly for new or infrequent users, both to give casual readers an easier path to becoming more engaged users, and also to grow the readership of all our current authors. We've also focused closely on the parts of the app that heavily involved community members rely on most: the story authoring tool, the comment tree, and the comment authoring tool, for example, have all gotten major upgrades.
In fact, we've paid special attention to just about every part of the site. We know you're incredibly eager to test out the new version, so if you just can't want any longer, head over to dailykosbeta.com to play around with your existing login and password. But if you want to learn more about what we've done, go below the fold for all the details.
#ThereWillBeBugs
We would love to get your help in the finalizing our new software. With your help, Daily Kos will load much faster, be able to handle much more traffic, share more widely, and be kinder on the eyes. We'd love to have your feedback and your help in exercising the new software. We encourage you to run through all the usual actions you take on Daily Kos: Post stories, comments, recommend posts and comments, and so forth.
Since the new software is housed on what we call a "sandbox," what happens on beta stays on beta. Most rules of the site will be relaxed there so you can really run the software through its paces, and you don't have to worry about anything breaking. In fact, we want you to try! But one rule is still very much in place: Don't be a dick. Otherwise:
- The data is completely separate—stories, comments, etc. created on beta will not make it back to dailykos.com.
- Sockpuppets (fake/dummy accounts) are allowed, but please use them only in fun. Zombie accounts (banned users singing in under a new name) are not allowed.
- You're allowed to do pernicious things to try to break stuff.
- Hide rates, etc. stay on beta, so there is no need worry about losing trusted or other status on Daily Kos.
- Data may be flushed without warning, so don't post anything on beta that you want a permanent record of! We'll try not to flush anything, but we can't promise.
- Nothing you do (short of serious assholery) will affect your status on Daily Kos. But again, don't be a dick.
There Will Be Bugs. And we want to know about them. Please report any issues you find here to the following help desk categories:
When Daily Kos version 4 (the current version of the site) was launched, the beta testers were critical to refining the design and finding bugs. The more exhaustively tested beta is, the better the site will be when the new software is publicly launched at Daily Kos proper. What's in it for you? Better software, better tuned to your needs, and, for everybody who participates on the helpdesk threads or creates content on dailykosbeta.com, a shiny new beta tester badge.
So please go forth and break things! As we get feedback, we'll deploy fixes and improvements to beta and let you know about them, and we'll continue to solicit feedback. Together, I hope we can make this new version of Daily Kos really sing.
What's New?
The short answer is: everything. Every bit of code behind these pages was rewritten from scratch so that we could employ the latest technology to speed the pages up. Compare any story page on the beta site to any on dailykos.com and you should see a dramatic speed upgrade.
The long answer is much, much longer. What follows is a list of the changes and the motivation behind them.
New Visual Style
Our biggest goal here was to make the site more legible in general, and to make the site more quickly and easily comprehensible to new users. We've gone from a site with an almost clubhouse feel—where those most devoted to politics and political activism go to discuss and commune—to a content powerhouse on the web bringing in a lot of new users.
Our stories reach a great number of people who aren't die-hard progressives or activists, but who are sympathetic to the cause and looking for something good to read. For these readers we can't lean on their good graces. We need to quickly and clearly present them with an attractive-looking web page that can be read easily and presents other interesting things to read without any need for a deep understanding of how the site is organized.
You'll see a lot of design best practices in place here: generous and consistent use of white space, a consistent color pallet and typography, big lush images, a minimum of decoration, and reuse of design elements.
You'll also see the limits of the work we've done if you click around. Daily Kos is a large site, and we have not yet been able to port all pages, so you will see the old style mixed in with the new- the old style on pages that have not yet been rewritten. That said, that great majority of pages requests- those for the front page or story pages- will now have the new styles.
Top Nav
The biggest change to our navigation bar at the top of the site (aka our "Top Nav") is that we are reorganizing the site content behind our venerable "News, Community, Action" tag line. This slogan clearly describes who we are and also what we have to offer users. Roll over any of these words to drill down to specific categories like Elections or Labor, and from there you can find our most recent stories or petitions.
We know from our site metrics that a dominant use of the front page is to access the Community Spotlight, Recommended Diaries, and Recent Diaries lists. Now you'll have access to these stories pretty much everywhere, just by checking the top nav. When you scroll down, you'll still have access to much of the top nav, though it will shrink down to be a single unobtrusive line.
Other jumping-off points in the top nav include the ability to see and jump to new replies to your comments or Kos Mail. The "Welcome Back" box is now integrated into the top nav so you will have ready access to your drafts, story stream, etc. And in bright orange, there's the "Blog It!" button. Can you tell we really want you to click that button?
Tags
We have also integrated tags into the top nav, and in general we're making tags more prominently visible across the site. Given the massive amount of content on Daily Kos, we're well past the point where deliberate attempts to organize it, whether by Daily Kos staff or our wonderful Community Spotlight volunteers, are enough to highlight all the great stories available here. Tags allow a bottom-up organization of content. So you will now be able to see which topics are heating up and quickly find recent stories on those topics.
In an effort to join our efforts with activists across the web, we've changed the format of our tags. To those not familiar to Daily Kos, they'll look very much like the common Twitter-style hash tag with no spaces. However, they will retain the sophistication of Daily Kos tags. These changes are site-wide, from the top nav to the story pages. Furthermore, tags have come to represent common cause online. From #OccupyWallStreet to #BlackLivesMatter, online activism very much organizes itself behind tags.
Story Page Layout
The main goal for the story page layout to make it legible and scannable, with big headlines and generous amounts of white space between lines to make the text clear and readable. All the meta data about each story, like tags and recommends, has been moved into a side column so your eye can move straight down the page without distraction. Sharing tools are also neatly organized in that same side column.
We know that people don't just start immediately reading after a page loads. First they scan the page and look for clues that the story is worth their time—there is a lot of content on the web, after all. Readers are looking for something that catches their attention. Do I know and respect the author? Is the story about a topic I care about?
The story's image is a great way to draw readers in. That image is now a first-class part of the site. It will appear just about everywhere: as a preview in the top nav, the sidebar on the right-hand side of the front page of Daily Kos, and on mobile blog pages. It will also be displayed on Facebook and other social networks when the story is shared. Use it to pique interest and get your readers attention.
Comments
There have been a lot of changes to comments. At first look, you'll see that we've removed titles and moved signature lines (aka "siglines") out, moved all the information about the comment below the comment itself, and added avatars.
The comment tree should hopefully look simpler and cleaner. A single comment should be presented simply—if there is weight to it, it comes from the argument. In contrast, comment trees can be large and complicated, representing many people talking on many different threads, so simplifying comments is also an attempt to make it easier to find your way through comment threads to find interesting comments more easily.
Siglines, while no longer shown in comments themselves, have gotten quite an upgrade. Hover over any user name in comments and you'll see that person's mini-profile, a popup with all sorts of information about the author, from tags they've written about to badges they've earned. And, of course, the sigline shows up in the mini-profile, too. This both keeps the comment tree easier to read and gives a better quick look at the comment's author.
Comments now have a first-class authoring tool, just like stories. In fact, the tool shares much of its code and feature set with the story authoring tool. You can easily embed tweets or YouTube videos or content from many other sites—just paste in the web address of the original piece of content. There's also easy access to the image library, and formatting is as easy as clicking a button (no more HTML needed).
A caveat is that we are still tuning the hidden comment feature. Please give us a bit of time to work this out.
Story-Authoring Tool
There is so much new here that I'll be revisiting the story-authoring tool later in another post, but here's a quick description of our design motivation and feature set. Writing stories is at the heart of Daily Kos, so we wanted to create the best tool possible for writing online. The story-authoring tool needed to be simple enough for new users to get started right away, while being as powerful and feature-rich as possible for more seasoned writers to take advantage of.
More: It needed to provide as little visible distraction as possible. It needed to make it easy to be a good citizen of the web—that is, to make it easy to embed content from other sites, and easy to compose content that shared well on social media. We've put quite a lot of thought into this tool. Please give it a try and let us know what you think.
Thanks!
We would love to know what you think. Please give dailykosbeta.com a good run-through. Kick the tires, take it for a test drive. Let us know your thoughts, and we'll adapt to your feedback as best as we can. The more feedback we get, the fast we can fix things, and the sooner we can improve the site even further and roll out this new software for everyone. Thanks for your help!