Doc175: Navigating the Interface

Title: Navigating the Interface - In the Mexico Skin

The Mexico skin is the default Traction skin as of Release 3.7. Like most Traction skins, it consists of five primary view types: the front page, the project newspage, the single-entry, the multi-entry, and the search result views. This topic provides an introduction to each view type.

Front Page

The Front Page is a roll-up of information posted to all projects for which you have read permission. It is your typical launching point into Traction.

The Header

The Locator

The locator in the top left says you are on the Front Page. The locator is sometimes referred to as a "bread crumb".

When you click into a project or article Consists of a Title, Text, Attachments and Labels, the locator expands. For example, if you are in the 5th article in the HR project, the locator will read:

frontpage > HR > 5

See the example below, showing the locator that matches the Traction ID (HR5), as presented under the title of the Article:

You can always click on the Front Page link in the bread crumb to return to the Front Page, or in this case you can also click the HR link in the locator in order to go to the HR Project Newspage.

The Search Box

The search box in the upper right lets you type a search or a Introduction to the Rapid Selector Guide command. Rapid Selector commands let you enter complex searches and navigate to any view in Traction with just few keystrokes.

The Front Page Body

The main body of the Front Page shows the contents of the Front Page sections defined by the administrator in Server Setup. In this example:

The Headlines section shows the most recent articles from any project you can read that are marked with the corresponding headline label. The section displays the article title and first paragraph (the Brief view) and it displays article details including the author, Traction ID, the publish date, the publish time (in your selected time zone) and how many comments are on the article.

The Recent Articles section, displays most recent articles and comments, including title and article details

You can click the section heading "Headlines" to go to a view of all articles matching the requirements of the section (in this case, including the Headline label from any project). The same rule applies for any section; clicking the heading "Recent Articles" will take you to a view of all articles and comments in all projects you can see.

Assuming you have Author permission in at least one project, the Add button will appear and you can click it launch an Add New Article form which will publish content into the corresponding section. In the Headline's case, the Add New Article form will have the Headline label already chosen.

Note: the person who has server setup permission can add sections, remove and change the default sections, add and remove sidebar entries, and change other page defaults, so what you see may differ from the organization as presented in this help guide.

At the bottom of the page there is a Feedback link that will allow you to fill out and send us a feedback, feature suggestion, or bug report which will include your system information, a Contact Us link to send us an email, and a Help link which will return you to this guide.

The Front Page Right Column

The right column shows the date range selector, tool links, account links, the sidebar article, and links to RSS and Atom versions of the current page.

The date range selector is a calendar navigator which tells you which timeslice is selected, indicates on which dates information in the current view has been posted, and allows you to navigate back and forth through time. Every character or word on the calendar is a link and will change your selected timeslice.

The default timeslice (which your administrator may override) is all time. In the example below, you can see that the selected timeslice is all time. As we are on the Front Page view, the date range selector is showing us that there is content in projects you can see which was posted in the years 2005 and 2005.

If you click 2006, the calendar will show you the months in bold (February, May, June and July) where content was posted in that year:

If you click on June, the calendar will show you the days in bold (5th and 6th) when content was posted in that month.

Now that we have gone back in time to a timeslice preceding another timeslice (July) where there was activity, the Recent Articles section on the front page (because it is time ordered) will only reflect new articles and comments as of the end of June 2006.

Note: Sections like Headlines and Recent Articles which show views of content in a time ordered view may have a Minimum setting. If there is a Minimum setting, and there is no content in the selected timeslice, the section will display the Minimum number of articles and comments from previous timeslices.

In order to go back to the current timeslice, you can do any of

(1) click on the Go To Today link (which will bring you to a month timeslice view of the current month

(2) click on the right double arrow to page forward month by month or

(3) click the year 2006 to return to the full year view.

The available Tools on the Front Page include Add New Article (button is on the grey bar at the top right). The available tools will vary depending on your view. Many more (like edit, comment, email articles, and print) will appear in a single-entry or multi-entry view.

The Account section in the right column provides links that allow you to go to Server Setup and Project Setup (if you have permission to either), Personal Setup (My Account) The Collector, and Sign Out.

The Sidebar Article is the area below the account tools which (in the example) is titled "Sidebar Shortcuts". The sidebar article is just an Article in Traction, but has been promoted to appear in this position.It is an easy way to customize this part of the right navigation to include helpful links which users may want in all views. Your administrator may or may not have defaulted the Front Page and Project Newspages to show a sidebar article.

The XML Feeds section in the right column provides the links to RSS and Atom feeds for this view. The view, in this context, is the Front Page which includes all projects and will deliver all content from all projects which you can see.

XML Feeds from Traction are dynamic and permission filtered. If you hand me the RSS or ATOM link, I may get a different result based on my permissions. If you are in a multi entry view, a search view, or a project newspage, then the XML feed links from that view will provide a feed of that view specifically.

You can copy these links into an RSS readers to receive a syndicated XML feed from the selected view. You can click either feed button to see an HTML view of the feed that is browser friendly. Your RSS reader would, instead, receive the XML format.

The Front Page Left Column

The left column lists the Front Page sections (if section links are enabled by your administrator) and gives you access to the list of projects you can read. Depending on your preferences and server settings, you may see a list of all projects or a pulldown "jump menu" listing the projects.

Default display: list of projects, indicating number of articles and comments for each in the current timeslice

Jump menu (shown expanded). Choose a project to jump to that project's Newspage.

Clicking on a project will take you to the project's newspage.

The front page section links match the sections on the body of the front page. In this case, they include Headlines and Recent Entries. Your server administrator may have removed these or created new sections.

Note that the default sections in the body of the Front Page show the most recent entries for each section, sometimes drawing upon content posted prior to the selected timeslice if the administrator set a Minimum on the section. When you click the link, you will see the section's entries for the selected time period. Sections may be defined to show a minimum number of entries. If there are not enough entries in the current time period, the section may show entries in an earlier period. If this is the case, clicking a section link, which shows the current period, may lead to a page with no entries.

Project Newspage

The Project Newspage allows you to view content relating to a specific project or topic. In the example below, we clicked on the Project name Executive in the left navigation.

Similar to the Front Page, whose sections can be defined by the server administrator, Project Newspage sections can be configured for each project by that project's administrator.

In the Executive project example below, their are several sections, though some don't have content.

You will notice that the locator is updated to show your location (Front Page > Executive > Newspage) and the calendar may now show different dates (only the year 2006) in bold, to correspond to the content which has been posted to this specific project.

Sections: This newspage uses the Project Team section and label template. A few of the sections are worth describing here:

The Issues To Do and Questions To Do rely on the respective Issue or Question label used with the To Do label. When you check the To Do box to Done, the corresponding Issue or Question will disappear from these sections.
The Recent To Do and Recently Done label respond to the date when the To Do or Done label was added to the article, rather than the date the article was posted.
The Bulletins section ignores time and lists articles alphabetically.

Section Links and Label list

Section Links: The section links reflect the sections on the body of the Project Newspage. Remember that the sections in the body of the Newspage show the most recent entries for each section. When you click the link, you will see all entries for the selected time period... so if you click here you may see different content or no content at all.

Label Links: The Label list shows all labels in the given project. the number next to a label indicates the number of articles or comments where it is used in the selected timeslice. Clicking a label from here (or when you see one on an article) will result in a view of articles and comments which have that label in the selected timeslice. Once in that multi-entry view, you can navigate forwards or backwards in time of course.

In this example, the label headline has been applied to 1 article that were posted in the year 2006.

XML Feeds: The feed links displayed from the Project Newspage correspond to XML Feeds of the articles and comments posted to this project.

Shared Files for Executive: This link goes to a share folder for the project. Usually, you will attach files to articles. However, sometimes you may want to have a separate share folder for the team. If there are files in the folder, it will display the most recently added files underneath the folder link. .

Click the folder link to open the share folder for the project

From here you can add or edit files or folders. When you are using Internet Explorer, MS Office files may (depending on admin settings, and whether you have permission to edit share folder) have an Edit button which will launch the file in its native application and allow you to edit it over the web.

Click the icon next to the file to see file details. Files may optionally be set for version tracking which also allows for check out, locking, and check-in.

You can also click the web folder icon to open this folder up in Windows Explorer.

Single Entry View

This view shows one article. It also provides context within the article by showing labels in the right margin, comments inline, and a list of Related Entries at the bottom. The Related Entries section shows lists of articles which have a relationship to this article. The most common examples of relationships include:

References: Articles to which this article links.
Referenced By: Articles linking to this article. These are sometimes called back links.
Emailed by: Articles resulting from cases where this article was emailed by a user from Traction.

The example below is titled "Testing Unit Delivery Delayed." You can see under the Title that it's TractionID is Engineering39 and it was posted by Admin on May 1, 2006 at 10:58:21 EDT. The header also shows you the author, editing authors, an edit history link (edit history is only visible if you have edit permission), a cross references link and an indication that there is 1 comment..

Note that the URL embedded in the TractionID, Engineering39, link is this article's permalink (#), which will read as servername/tracti…. When linking within Traction, use the TractionID, Engineering39 in this case, and use the permalink when linking from another website or an email.

In the upper right margin, you can see that there are two labels on title/article level, the done label and the issue label.

The 1 comment is an article level comment, so it appears below the first paragraph.

Following the article, there is a comment form, the Related Articles section, and the Discussion Thread section. The Related Articles section lists the articles that are linked to from this article and that link to this article. The Discussion thread section models the comment threads on this article and allows you to navigate to various levels of the discussion.

The Article, Export and Page Tools displayed depend on the view type. The single entry view shows most of the potential tools:

Note that most of the Article Tools e.g. edit article, erase article and visibility, depend on permissions controlled by the project administrator. If you don't have the permission, you won't see the tool.

Article Tools operate over the article in a single article view. Export and Page Tools operate over all the articles and comments which appear in a single article view (in which case there is only one) or a multi-entry view.

Expanding and collapsing comments or comment threads

If an article has a lot of comments, you may want to collapse all comments, hide all comments, or collapse specific comments or comment threads.

In this example, the user has chosen to show all comments in Expanded mode.

You will notice the collapse icons to the left of a thread

or on the upper right of each comment

. You can click these to minimize the comment or whole thread:

The thread will collapse as you see below, and can be expanded by clicking on the comment snippet or the expand control:

Multi-entry view and Search Results View

Multi-entry views are like stacked single-entry views, except that in some cases they show less contextual detail. The most common ways to get to a multi-entry view include:

Clicking on a label within an article or on a label from a project's label list in the left column
Clicking a section title link
Advanced Search (when searching for a label)

Multi-entry views appear, by default, in brief volume which means they only show the title and the lead paragraph or the matching paragraph (if a selected label was placed on a paragraph level). Paragraphs are selected for inclusion differently based on the view type, depending on whether they match a search expression, have comments, or have labels.

The Search Results view is another form of multi-entry view. You will learn more about search in the Searching in Traction section.

The following example shows a multi-entry view in Brief volume for the label FAQ in the Engineering Project. The Brief volume will show all paragraphs which have the label or labels sought for in this view. In this case, the FAQ label in each example is on the article title so it is showing the nearest (the first) paragraph.

Locator: The locator shows that you are in the FAQ topic for the Engineering project. You can click the Engineering link to go to the Engineering project, or the Front Page link to return to the Front Page.

Date Range Selector : The selected date range is the year of 2006. Also notice that the date range selector has bolded May and June to indicate that the contents of this view are published in those months. We can drill further into the calendar to see what days have content.

Volume Selector: You will find the volume selector in the upper right of the body column in single and multi-entry views. You can switch to Full Content, Brief Content, Snippets, Details or Titles volume with the volume selector. You can also select whether to expand, collapse or hide comments which are shown in-line with the content in the view.

Switching to Details will collapse the view to look like this:

Left Navigation: The left navigation column appears as before. The current project and the corresponding selected label are highlighted. In this context, you also see an "On this Page" navigator.

On This Page Navigator in Full or Brief Content Views: The On this Page part of the left column allows for drill-down navigation. It will only appear if your Volume Selector is set to Brief or Full Content views as both these views display labels, whereas Snippets, Details and Titles do not show labels. This list tells you which labels appear on how many articles or comments in the current view. We clicked the FAQ label and got 3 results. So, "On this Page" shows 3 results. As it turns out, of those 3 results, 2 are also marked with the bulletin label, 1 is marked done and 1 is marked question.

On this Page is scoped to this actual page. If there are 40 articles marked FAQ but only 25 are showing (with an option to move to the next 25 or show all at the bottom of the page) then it will report the On this Page results for only the 25 displayed articles.

You can click any of the labels in the On this Page result to drill down to a Mulitple Articles view of the combined result, where you can drill down further.

Page Tools & Right Column: Notice that the Page Tools showing on the right column of the page now includes Change Labels and some of the tools that were in the single-entry view, like Edit Article or Add Comment are no longer displayed. Change Labels in this context would allow you to remove or add labels to all the articles in this view. Print, email and export controls also apply to all articles in the view.

Nonetheless, you can generally still access these tools from the context menu.

XML Feed of this View: It is worth remembering that most views in Traction have a corresponding XML Feed. The XML Feed Links in the right column of this view now correspond to the results with the label FAQ. This will work for any search or label view. It will not work for "On this Page" drill down results (but if you want to create an XML Feed of a multiple label result, you could use advanced search to select multiple labels and qualify with the ALL instead of ANY labels check box).

Hiding/Showing Articles In-Line from Brief and Full views

Have you ever looked at list of search results and wanted to see the full contents of some results while minimizing the others? In Brief or Full content Multi Entry views in Traction, you can hide and show articles on a page by clicking the hide/show toggle, shown highlighted below.

Whether an article was last hidden or shown is not currently preserved when you leave the page.

Center Column Navigation Controls

At the top of the center column is a list of view types that you can navigate to quickly.

All Recent shows recent articles interleaved with recent comments in the order in which they were posted.
Recent Articles shows recent articles only.
Recent Comments shows recently posted comments.
Recently Edited shows the most recently edited articles.
Discussions shows the most recently commented-on articles.

In topic views, an additional line is displayed providing a few more options.

By Label shows those articles posted during the time period on which the specified label appears..
By Label Added shows those articles to which the specified label was added during the time period.
By Label Removed shows those articles from which the specified label was removed during the time period.

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referenced by (3)

Doc357: Traction User Guide Doc300: Traction Skins Doc237: Searching in Traction

Article: Doc175 (permalink)
Date: March 22, 2008; 4:09:15 PM Eastern Daylight Time

Author Name: Documentation Importer
Author ID: importer