New Feature: The Clarion Roadmap

Posted April 21 2010

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Clarion Magazine contains a wealth of information, but it hasn't always been easy to get the big picture. Our topical index helped, but it was difficult to maintain and not very flexible.

Our new "roadmap" view of the magazine lets you easily navigate to your areas of interest. Why do we call it a roadmap? Because a roadmap gives you the lay of the land, and helps you reach your destination. It also shows you destinations you may not have considered.

Note: The following screen shots are taken from an admin page, which is also used to create and maintain the roadmap(s); we hope to have the public-facing page up on the beta site early next week). This is a preliminary version of the outline.

The default ClarionMag roadmap view is an outline, much like a table of contents (Figure 1).

Figure 1. The top-level outline view

You can click on nodes individually to expand them, or you can use a spinbox to expand all nodes to a specified level. In Figure 2 several nodes have been expanded manually, including the Tagging heading with five articles.

Loading all of the articles under each outline item would take a lot of time and make the page too slow, so instead the articles are loaded on demand, when you expand an articles node. Besides the articles (items) node, look for product, video, audio and web nodes in the near future.

Hover over an article title and you can read the summary (Figure 3).

Figure 3. Reading an article summary as a tooltip

Click on the article to view it. At that point you'll have the option to add it to your "favorites" list or your "read later" list (Figure 4).

Figure 4. Links to add the article to your favorites and read later lists

You can view your lists via the My ClarionMag page (Figure 5).

Figure 5. Viewing the article lists.

You can use the article lists independently of the roadmap.

Multiple roadmap views

Sometimes you want to see the whole roadmap, and sometimes you just want to see part of the roadmap. So we've added the ability to filter the roadmap. We'll be providing a number of standard filters (Figure 6 shows the first two, Getting Started and Browses & Forms). You can choose the filter you want from the drop-down list.

Figure 6. Choosing a roadmap filter

Figure 7. The Getting Started view (under construction)

And if none of the pre-packaged filters suit your taste, you can create your own personalized roadmap filter. Just choose the *My ClarionMag option (name subject to change) from the dropdown list, and an Edit button appears.

Figure 8. The My ClarionMag filter

Click on the Edit button and you see a view of the roadmap with checkboxes by each topic.

Figure 9. Creating the filter

Select the topics you're interested in. Click Save, and you now have your very own personalized roadmap filter. You can always go back and make changes. In Figure 10 I've scrolled down and added the Getting Started - SQL topic.

Figure 10. Adding another topic to the filter

Figure 11 shows the updated outline view with my personal filter applied.

Figure 11. The updated filter has been applied

As new items added to Clarion Magazine and tagged, they're automatically added to the roadmap via their tags and they appear in your personalized roadmap view where appropriate.

Future roadmap enhancements

Currently only articles are listed in the outline view, but we'll be adding third party products, blogs, podcasts, screencasts and other resources to the roadmap.

For .NET

We will have a Clarion#-specific roadmap view as well. For the larger world of .NET development we'll be applying this same roadmap technology in our subscription-based DevRoadmaps.com site.

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