Growing Guides Interface

The rest of the conversation is here: https://github.com/FarmBot/OpenFarm/issues/156,

but please continue having it here.

I just wanted to throw in here a quick note about something Rory and I have been discussing over the past couple of days...

The more I've learned about growing guides the more I've become worried that there's no space for personality. Both the creation process and final display seem to be really geared towards uniformity and a priority on ensuring useful data, which is great on one side but leads me to the question: do I want to spend my time making a guide onto which I have no space for creative expression?

A couple quick ideas to throw in for ways to allow for the expression for author personality in guide creation:

• Allow 'meta' information to be posted around the various sections and life-cycle stage data. I'm imagining a bit like how comments exist around an image on Google Drive. The author can and should be encouraged to post images and creative content. This is in contrast to a textbox marked 'Tips' which might leave some users feeling like there's no good place for them to inject their personality into the guide. Popular forum comments could also be promoted to be shown in a similar manor, and perhaps therefore the author's creative content gets highlighted somehow.
• Allow the user to set their own guide title as an additional option to the Name Keyword Crop format currently being discussed.

I think the "Name Keyword Crop" should be a prefill in the creation process (we can still ask for keywords during that process, and maybe display them under the guide), but the user should be able to edit it to whatever they want.

Re, the comments: I imagine what you describe is for example that a user can add a little call out to "sun/shade" that says "These tomatoes really love the sun!". Maybe personalizing the description that gets usually shown?

Another simple way to make guides and gardens their own is background and font choices. More structured than myspace, more like how Twitter does it?

I just reworked the original mockup to match some site-wide restyling we've been kicking around. It's almost all the same info but formatted differently to breathe more and tone down the rainbow. A noteworthy change in this mockup is how the actual growing instructions are displayed. The idea (and it's just an idea atm) is that based on the data entered in during Guide Creation, we'll autogenerate a 'narrative' of the instruction so it reads like a sentence rather than a table of actions and values. This gives it a little more user friendliness (I think) while keeping the underlying data model systematic, therefore machine readable and translatable.

Please provide any and all feedback either here or add comments on the original document here: https://drive.google.com/open?id=118gwej5QWF4w1WlI8jGF91E76zxAzRo7cu4DW9IZrI4&authuser=0 Woo!

Also, @andruvallance, I know of a really exciting opportunity for us to implement the meta data and commenting ideas we spoke about. I need to investigate a bit but will be sharing soon, probably in another thread.