Merlin: A Wizard is Born
This is part two of a series on Merlin. I recommend you read from the beginning.
With only an idea, I still needed to figure out what form it would take. After all, what I was proposing was a no-code approach to radical customization. What kind of customizations were folks really looking for? How could I keep the UI relatively clean and not add another billion options to the ever-growing Control Panel? At this point, I realized that I had too many questions. So I did what most of our customers do when they're looking for answers...I went to communityserver.org.
What I found seemed obvious in hindsight, but I had never approached it from the same viewpoint. A lot of people weren't necessarily asking for new features, but new ways to leverage existing features. So, for example, while a user can turn on thread tracking in his profile, an administrator was looking for a way to make it the default. Other admins wanted each newly registered user to have a blog and/or gallery. From my personal experience, I wanted a way to publish a post to the announcements blog and have it also appear as a forum post. None of these were novel ideas, and all were accomplishable by tweaking a couple lines of code, or changing an option, but I began to see a new way of looking at our functionality...more granular.
I finally came to the conclusion that my idea would require at least two parts:
- Pre-built building blocks
- A way to assemble the blocks
In thinking thru how to present this kind of tool to an administrator, I quickly landed with the concept found in Outlook's Rules Wizard.
So with a decent metaphor, an understanding of the flow, a name (Merlin), and still more questions, I set out to start writing some code... (continued)