All about developing user interfaces for Oxwall.

According to Oxwall design principles, user interfaces are implemented in plugins (not themes). These instructions in document serve more for plugin developers than for theme designers. We make it possible for you to build your functionality consistent with established Oxwall interface paradigms. This will be a result of integrated user experience which is our ultimate goal.

Box is used to display a standalone piece of content. Box as a design element.

Has optional parts such as:

Usually contains the title of widget and its icon.

Usually used for various selections and/or modes of content display.

Usually used for summary info and/or further actions with content.

Used for main form actions, standalone actions and is prominently displayed with unambiguous captions. Big size is recommended.

Used for group actions upon objects. Color coding may be applied for highlighting the meaning of an action. Modest size is recommended.

If it's used as a button, appears with mouse over effect. It can be used in profile view, forum and around the avatar area; small size is recommended.

A button or a block of buttons with optional dropdown menu. Usually more important content is in a block of buttons and less important is placed in the dropdown menu. It is often placed in the top right corner of a container. In case your plugin logic requires it, you can change the position. Use the dropdown menu with mouse over effect. Context action as a design element.

Oxwall forms may contain more than one action button. There are two types of form submit actions: positive (including neutral) and negative.

Positive submit action:

Example: Submit, Save, Register, Create, Add etc. Additional positive actions can be used as an alternative for a main action. For example, creating a blog post you can let user choose either to Publish or to Save as draft. When there are both main and alternative actions are together, it's recommended to highlight the predominating action by a CSS class, to indicate which is obviously the main.

Negative submit action:

Example: Cancel, Reset, Delete etc. Negative actions used to be before positive submit actions and are usually highlighted with special CSS class in order to prevent user from pressing it unintentionally.

Note: We use standard buttons for regular forms.

In order, to develop a form for creating the blog post. We would need a Publish button, below the form:

We have to give users an option to save it for future as well; let them edit the content later, till the time they would like to publish it. An alternative action is to Save as draft. The presence of the alternative action, requires the choosing of a main action. So we apply a special “positive” CSS style for the main action, which in this case would be Publish. In this theme we highlighted the button label with orange colour:

Usually are placed in Profile view or Join forms. Here are the examples of sections as information,

and sections in edit:

A floatbox with a confirmation text and a button offering a referential action. The Cancel button is absent, to prevent the undesired accidental clicking. We've put an X-close for canceling the action option. (Esc button cancels it as well)

The buttons to sort the content by several options. The first option is always default. The options label names have to be as short as possible and contain preferably less than 4-5 options to avoid the blocks of buttons grow out of the space.

:

Consists of Tabs that indicate the type of existing content. The examples of active Tab and hover: