Here’s a theoretical post about what an updated Tabulas’ might look like. This is in no order of real preference, but rather as the ideas spill out. Each of these ideas require a whole posting in and of themselves, but here is where my thinking is at right now. Ideas subject to change, based on feedback and further thinking.

Well, before we begin, what is Tabulas’ role? How does it fit into the very crowded work of self-publishing?

Tabulas’ is geared towards people writing original content in their areas of expertise. In its most common manifestation, this might simply be their personal lives - an online journal. In other formats, they might start writing about their work or their professional interests. This isn’t that different from the existing Tabulas use case. The goal of these changes is to empower creators to be able to create and share more content easily within Tabulas. This is done by simplifying existing concepts and be removing some edge-features that aren’t worth maintaining. We instead focus that effort into building a slick UI for managing the content (as well as slick default layout).

What changes is the UI approach in the control panel to these features. Currently the tabs really indicate where my thinking used to be - Tabulas is an overarching bucket for all your random content. Photos is a separate feature from images, etc.

Instead of providing multiple UIs to interact with the content from a visitor’s perspective, the visitor’s interface is simple: the journal itself. Facebook has done a great job of delivering different content types via a unified stream (shared links, status posts, activity, and photos). Tabulas would follow this concept. This simplifies the front-end view to a journal view, a photo view, and profile (user) view. (So you basically lose links and files as separate pages - pages also disappears, but more on this later). Simple.

Comments would be handled only internally (no more guest posting), but users can log-in with Twitter/FB/LinkedIn to post comments without creating a Tabulas account. This should cut down on spam. 

The discovery mechanisms would be changed - favorites would be removed in favor of a “liked” stream - this liked stream would contain entries that the user has liked across Tabulas. Friends would remain the same, but friends-of would disappear (you would find people who friended you through an internal activity stream on the control panel).

That would be the public view of your Tabulas. The control panel would change dramatically. The core experience for the backend revolves around three activities: posting new content, discovering activity around your content, and discovering new content inside the Tabulas ecosystem. From a prioritization standpoint, the last one isn’t as important as the first two.

The creation of posts is where I’d put the most emphasis right now. A post, being a textual entity, would also be a container for images (a post would basically replace an album) or video (v2). That means one UI for adding photos, adding posts, or adding pages.

As far as pages go, I want to remove pages as a feature altogether, and use posts instead.

What I’ll add (and what WordPress did well) is create a “menu” feature. A “menu” item can contain posts, pages, external links. As far as I can tell, users on Tabulas use pages to “feature” posts along their sidebar. We can do this without adding a whole new feature called ‘pages.’

Link management changes dramatically - I haven’t fleshed out the details completely, but I want to piggyback off of Pinboard.in. Use pinboard.in to handle link storage, and pulling links out for entry creation. (Most of my posts used to be an aggregation of links I found interesting - I see no reason we can’t continue that by using Pinboard as the backend).

As far as styling goes, the engine will probably not change (ugh). However, I will actually invest time into making a layout that doesn’t suck (I’ve said this before so many times...). There has been a plethora of changes in the CSS3 and browser world since 2006, and we can take advantage of those changes (beautiful typography, textures and gradients). In the earliest iteration, I will probably remove custom theming options (or make a really non-explanatory page where you can change your theme) and force everybody to use the same theme. But having the ability to theme is very important, and something Tabulas will continue to support.

Tracks, messages and tagboard will probably permanently go away. Site logging will be removed temporarily with the goal of bringing it back in the future.

Crossposting and other external integration methods will go away while I re-examine them. I will instead focus on providing single sign-on with Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. The only API I plan on building atop of right now is Pinboard.in. The future long-term API I plan on building atop of is app.net (if it comes to fruition). Besides the sharing components, all data APIs will come from paid services, not ad-supported services.