"Top level selector” and main navigation bar

Question

Hi,

at Discovery Summit in Brussels Julian and myself wondered how to improve the navigation between the main user community and sub-communities - like the Academic Community.

One idea was to replace this image in the page header

by a community selector. Some benefits we saw are:

* Better visibility that there are multiple communities.
* Directly see on highest level in which community you are right now.
* The “Other communities” drop-down could be removed from the top-level menu, and the top-level menu with Home, File Exchange, Discussions and Resources only shown for the main user community. Maybe other communities could have their own top-level menu, or no top-level menu to save space?
* Less confusion caused by showing “User Community” when at Academic (or other) Community.
* Much cleaner overall navigation.

stanley.koprowski1 already offered to investigate this option.

Any feedback is welcome,

Volker

Here is another comment on this idea from julian :

Hi Volker and Stan,

I'm so excited that this might be a possibility! I think this would solve a lot of problems, as long as all the content under the top-level banner could be sub-space specific. My main concern is the main navigation bar and whether that could be "themed" for each sub-community. If so, our navigation between subspaces could work just like the main community. I think that would afford a sense of consistency to our sub-community, as well as all the others. Like you mentioned, if a navigation bar isn't necessary for a particular sub-community they would also be able to save the space and not use it.

I'm hoping we can make this happen! Please let me know if I can help.

Julian

JonesieAtJMP · Answer

Volker, it's hard to say on the timing of moving to Jive 8. There have been some issues in getting the theme customizations that were done in 7 imported into 8. stanley.koprowski1 is working with the Jive team to get this resolved, and then jonathan.bryant can start assessing how much work will be required.

Sorry to be so vague, but it seems like there are a lot of unknowns at this point.

volker_kraft · Answer

Thanks, John. Understood, makes sense

Any idea about the timing for Jive 8? FYI: We want to rebuild the Academic Community by end of September, I assume this will still happen in Jive 7 - and therefore use the same navigation we have in place today?

JonesieAtJMP · Answer

I think this thread raises some valid concerns around navigation throughout the community and sub-spaces. I would like to take a holistic approach and make sure that whatever we do follows good web user experience guidelines, as well as looking at how the navigation works in the community as well as how it relates to the main www.jmp.com web site. That said, doing any of this prior to completing the Jive 8 upgrade doesn't make a lot of sense. From talking to Jonathan, it seems that the theming and all of the styles aren't going to easily migrate from one environment to the other. So, whatever changes we make at this point in Jive 7 would just have to be re-implemented once we move to Jive 8.