Today I finally finished (mostly) the complete Articles section, including the main articles home page, the individual series pages, and the article display page. Each of these page types will also include a context menu (which I never used on Plagiarist.com).

The pages were simple enough. Ignoring the context menu for a minute - the main page lists each series, with a description of the series, each series page lists the articles in that series, with a brief abstract, and each article page lists the article.

I had a difficult time laying-out the main article home page (which is why I saved it for last) but I wanted to keep the article sections (each page in articles.poetryx.com) unified with standard divisions.

Of course the main site header is at the top and the site footer is at the bottom. But now instead of a single screen-wide area for each article list or article display page (by "display" I just mean the page where you read the actual article itself) there are two columns.

Shortening the width of the actual article text makes sense from both a layout and readability standpoint. Columns that are too wide are more difficult to read (since the eye has to find the start of the next line), especially when people use a small font (keeping in mind that Poetry X only specifies relative font sizes and that anyone can re-size the text either via their browser controls or through our handy "A A A A" font sizer in the header of every page).

Usability experts may over-state the difficulties inherent in a wide column, but anything we can do to make things easier to read is a Good Thing™ as far as we're concerned.

Anyway, the articles homepage is still kinda long, even with just the series titles and descriptions. I don't forsee having 80 different article series - but when there are hundreds of articles it may make sense to break them up further, into various sub-categories, etc.

I'm going to cross that bridge when I come to it.

The bulk of my work today was spent on the context menu, the little menu on the right that changes depending on the page. It's contextual.

I had expected that the context menu would take me an hour or two to build, and it wound-up taking nine and a half hours. And there are still a few additions and enhancements that I want to make to it.

Basically there are switches that can show the context menu in any of the below states:

1. Main Articles Page / Series List: This shows the most recent articles in each series. This is a little complex in itself, as it requires three database queries:
   1. Select the distinct list of the five most recent article series from the list of articles (in other words, I want to list five article series based on the most recent articles in each)
   2. Select the series name from the Series table based on the series ID field in the Articles list
   3. Select the three most recent articles in each of those five series
2. Individual Series Context: For each series, list the five lastest articles in that series, plus a list of all of the other series and a link back to the main articles home page
3. Article Display Page: For each article, list the five most recent articles in that series, up to five other articles by the same author (where applicable, if the author has written only a single article for us it won't show this sub-menu at all), list any talkback comment links for that particular article (with a link to the form following the article) and of course a link back to the articles home page. I believe I will change this soon to always list the talkback link.

All in all, it was a lot of work to get every case to work exactly right, and of course I also had to make the decisions about how it was going to work while I was building it, which is never a good idea.