I know this is a v1.0 “crucial” thread, but I have a hard time in my brain ranking things. I’m going to give my general list of wants and try my best to give some sense of priorities for me. Some of these are going to prompt “well, yeah, we’re doing that”, but I’ll leave them on my list anyway.
- Date stamps on posts. I’ve already said this elsewhere. This is high-priority for me, personally. (Tack onto this one the user’s local timezone thing, so I don’t keep thinking my own posts are coming from my future.)
- Navigation between and amongst posts. There should at least be previous/next links on every post. (Eventually a date archive somewhere, and search.) Honestly, I’d be okay with just the previous/next links in the near-term, and then readers can find other stuff via hashtags for the time being.
- Site-wide “branding” customizations. Mostly, for my purposes, fonts and colors. I want to use the color and font scheme I’m already using on the announcement page. This might even include an admin setting for what default serif, sans-serif, and fixed-width fonts are used for the blogs themselves.
- Option to limit user customizations. One of the things I actually liked about Medium was how little a user could do other than write. If I can’t disallow user customizations entirely (which is fine), I’d like to be able to restrict or minimize the options available. When a reader visits my instance, I want them to know from looking at it.
- More consistent navigation. I admit that I myself sometimes get confused as to what clicking the upper left corner of the site is going to do, as it seems to change depending on where I am? (This also could just be me in the midst of “I’m on a new site what’s happening” syndrome.)
- User setting for landing page default. While I get the design/UI choice behind starting on the editor, I find this a confusing approach to navigating the site. I actually want a proper front page that I can find even if I’m logged in. I’d be fine with this being a user setting for what they want as their start: the main site page or the editor.
ETA: I just noticed that on WriteFreely sites, while the blog index page, at the bottom, links to the site’s main page, blog posts themselves do not, and only link all the way back to WriteFreely. That doesn’t help discoverability when a reader comes to a blog post.