Rethinking our layout

[Jonathan Blandford <jrb redhat com>]

After a yarrr chat today, Colin, Seth and I sat down and rethought our
layout.  We started out talking about the live comments here:

http://yarrr.gnome.org/wiki/index.php/Yarrr_WikiLiveSections

However, we have been rethinking our overall push here.  We came out of
it wanting to push the wiki integration even more.

THE PLAN:

We are going to split chat out of discussion, and make it a separate
thing.  Instead of embedding a chat into a page, we're going to default
to having one on every page.  It won't be part of the page flow.  We're
going to put an expander on the top of the page that, when you click on
it, will covers the top half of the page with the chat area (ascii art
to follow).

   +----=====----+   +-------------+
   |             |   |             |
   |             |   | (chat area) |
   |             |   +----=====----+
   |             |   |             |
   |             |   |             |
   +-------------+   +-------------+

It'll be a fixed layout, so scrolling will go under the chat window, and
it won't relayout the page.  We're also going to add a keybinding to
show/hide it.  This will let you scroll to a relevant section of the
page and let it be visible in the bottom half -- hopefully avoiding the
current 'swapping' effect we see were people scroll between the chat and
an open comment.

The other change we're going to make is to have section editing embed a
live comment into the page.  This will allow us to collaboratively edit
a section at a time.  Colin is going to look into adding this.

Marco, if you want something to work on, we'd love to have a way to
regenerate a mediawiki section on the fly without reloading the whole
page.  This will let us update the section when the live comment is
closed.

There are a two, big ramifications from this change.  The first is that
we're basically going to be storing no interesting data in our current
database scheme with this.  We aren't keeping closed comments anymore,
but are pushing those changes to the wiki.  We are probably going to
store other information in the future, but for now, it's going to be
pretty useless.

The other is that I'd expect the standalone yarrr to break.  We should
just disable it for now.  I half-think we should turn it into an admin
console at some point, but we'll do that later.

Thanks,
-Jonathan