Versions in Docley: What does it offer and how we built it

Posted: November 12, 2009 | Categories: Docley Product

In the next couple of weeks, I am going to cover some of Docley’s main features every few days. Today we are going to look at how we created the versions screen and I will take you on the journey we went on to get this feature implemented. We will also show you what it looks like (there is a video below).

We used quite a few of 37 Signals’s Getting Real techniques to build the versioning feature in Docley. Firstly we took their advice in Chapter 6: From Idea to Implementation. We brainstormed on paper, before we coded anything. Here is the process:

First we designed the view users will see of the versions of their documents:

Then we designed the upload new version screen.

After this we realized that these should actually be one screen. Both these functions belong together and putting them on the same screen makes sense. So that is what we did.

After coding up the screen and tweaking it a bit, it looks like this:

As you can see we dropped the comments from versions, but more about that in another post. The comments functionality is now handled in another part of the application, but I have said to much already.

We also used Epicenter Design (Getting Real Chapter 9 ). The design process above describes only the piece of functionality that allows fro versioning. When we designed it, we only focused on the main part of the screen that the user will be interacting with. At this point we didn’t care about the other menus or the rest of the screen. We where totally focused on Versions of files.

Here is a quick screencast of the functionality (1:30 mins):

Versioning in Docley

Stay tuned, we will show you more Docley functionality soon. Subscribe to the Docley Blog Feed.