About a week ago, PeakD asked for feedback on how would you use a customizable site on Hive.
I'm not sure how I would use it, but I'd like to think of a few things a customizable site on Hive should have, compared to the standard front ends. Maybe the standard interfaces will pick up some of those ideas too, but not necessarily. Some are particularly useful for custom setups, that give a website its own personality. Otherwise, why would you customize it? Only for the custom domain name and toggling some options on and off? Not good enough...
Better Spacing Control
That's a BIG issue on Hive. Content aside, many posts look amateurish because spacing/padding can't be well controlled on either side of the text "box". I remember I was surprised about this when I first arrived to the legacy chain from having my own (highly customized) WP blog.
Just think how awkward it looks to use sub/superscript. Either the previous or the following line looks awful. Not to mention if the text is added as a caption to an image. I gave up using them because of how awkward they make the posts look. And sometimes, a smaller-than-normal font is necessary.
Therefore, we also need...
Custom Fonts
... and font sizes/styles.
The owner of the personalized website should have the option to use custom fonts. The minimum is to select the preferred fonts from a list of "approved" fonts for different types of text elements used (titles, various headings, normal text, quoted text, block code, super/sub scripts, etc.
Much better would be if the owner would be able to add their own custom fonts too. Their site, their business how they look.
Customizable CSS
The above can be done from a customized CSS, but the owner needs to know CSS and what to change. From a customized CSS classes can be defined with custom colors, to make certain pieces of text stand or fade out, for example, custom padding and spacing can be defined for special blocks of text, special effects can be added by those who prefer them, customizing the look of tables, blockquotes, code and block code, etc.
I would open up the CSS either only for the pages where the user has a direct impact (posts, feeds, custom pages - see below), but maybe I'll give access to (almost?) everything, and break down the CSS into pieces to make it clear what would be better left alone and what the user can play with without worrying they will break the site.
Additional Feed View Style Proposal
Making feed fully customizable, especially the layout, can be troublesome especially when dealing with people who don't know what they are doing, which may be the majority of those trying a customized website via Peak Open.
But a middle-ground would be adding another feed view style. One proposal I would have is this, and that could be added to PeakD as well.
For this new feed view style, I like how cointelegraph looks like. And it doesn't have to be multiple posts featured and cycled through them, if that makes the website heavy. One is enough (in which case, it would take up the whole page or start having more posts from the sideline instead of below). For example, that can be the user/community's last pinned post, or if no post is pinned, the last post that was published. In a community, maybe that should be switched by a moderator. Or switch as there is a new post from a list of whitelisted authors (if the old post has been featured for at least some time—this can be done by having an active and a following post, and a timeout; when the timeout runs out, if there is a following post, it is placed as featured, otherwise the old one remains, but the timeout remains at zero, and as soon as a new post is selected, it will replace the old one; the featured post can be replaced manually at any time).
Like on cointelegraph, the user would have to scroll down to see the rest of the posts, about the same size seems fine.
This view style could be interesting for certain businesses and their announcements, for news websites, for particular communities, for online shops, photo display (although the gallery view is better), etc.
Make Em Dashes More User Friendly (All Blogging Front Ends)
When I came to the legacy chain, there was no direct support for em dashes. Now it looks like there is—great! But writing — is not as easy or intuitively as typing -- or --- in WP...
Custom Pages
Then, looking through the PeakD interface, I ran into the tabs where you places Exchanges, Games, or Others, in the Wallet page. The user could define custom tabs to add there with their own content/links.
Custom full page could possibly be added as well? Maybe with some restrictions. But certainly accessible directly from below the website domain name, rather than the username wallet, as it is the case with these custom tabs. In the case of peakd.com, it would be something like peakd.com/my-custom-page. But of course, that would be on a different domain.
Final Words
Some of the ideas I added here go beyond having a customizable user interface for Hive. But maybe that's required to attract users with more pronounced owner mindset. That's what Hive wants, isn't it? More owners. More businesses.
There are limits to think about. Probably if we talk about custom pages, the user should self host too.