Ideas on how to simplify the site

stretch's picture

There are two features I'm considering disabling on this site at the expense of some flexibility. Both are kind of confusing, though.

One is the "Input Format" setting below every post. You can choose BBCode, which is typical of a messageboard, HTML, or MediaWiki input, which is what Wikipedia uses. I'm trying to accommodate just about anything that people would want to copy and past into here to make an article. After all, that's what I'm doing- copying old posts I've made on other forums, editing them, and posting them as articles.

The second feature I'm unsure about is this "book" functionality. It's built into Drupal, the software package I'm using. A "book" is a collection of pages that are linked together. I consider a book to be somewhat akin to a category. The benefit is that a nice table of contents gets automatically generated, kind of like a "related articles" section but ordered. The downside is that I've got the "Technical Articles" link on the left menu to only show books (for organizational purposes), which means articles not attached to a book won't show up there. (But any article can be its own book, no problem there.) Make sense? I really like the layout, but I'm not sure new users will find this easy to grasp. Still, there's not much downside- the search engine will still find everything, and a moderator can always organize things into books themselves.

Anyway, feedback appreciated.