As promised, today's batch of screenshots show some of Nleyten's forms in action. Like in previous screenshots, bear in mind that these reflect work in progress. More to the point, these shots reflect the "pre-bling" state of Nleyten, as there aren't yet any image gradients or any of the other tricks that make a web page look shiny. In due time that will come.

I'll start with the story submission forms. Now, story submission is potentially a daunting task. There's quite a lot of information that must be provided for even minimal stories, and if you take into account all the extra possibilities (such as uploading images used by the story), then it would be easy to overwhelm the contributors to the site. Since submitting a story is naturally a multi-step process, it made sense to borrow the "wizard" metaphor that is so common in modern user interfaces. The user is thus guided on a step-by-step journey, from an initial preliminary stage (making sure we are dealing with a real person and not a spambot), to the final acknowledgment of the submission.

Screenshot #10 shows the second step in story submission: providing the contents of the story. Because this is probably the longest form in the whole site, great care was put into dividing it in logical sections and documenting it profusely. In screenshot #11 you can see the rest of the form: note in particular how editing the markup for the story introduction can be made less intimidating thanks to the formatting buttons. Screenshot #12 shows the same portion of the form after the user has checked the box stating that the story has a body. Showing only the portions of the form strictly required at that point (such as the text area in the latter screenshot) can go a long way towards minimising clutter.

(You may have noticed bits of the actual markup that I'm planning to use for stories. The format is heavily inspired by LaTeX, and for good reasons. I'll come back to the subject of markup in a future post. Stay tuned).

At last, take a look at screenshot #13. It shows the form that appears when you click the "reply" button on a comment. (embedded into the document — how ajaxy of me!) The markup used in the comments will be the same as the one used in stories, but with some restrictions (no images allowed, for example). By the way, having the comment reply form appear "in loco" gives rise to interesting interaction possibilities: those suffering from attention deficit disorders will be happy to know they can write replies to multiple comments simultaneously... (see screenshot #14 for an example).