[Strategic] Action: Test front page with moved search form

[Dermot McNally]

Folks,

I have surmounted large amounts of personal skill gap in rails and git
to produce a version of the front page with the search form moved to
the top right. My first intention had been to try to find space among
the login links, but based on a suggestion received I've instead
allowed it to be a layer floating above the top right of the map
itself. I think that this is far from perfect in a number of ways
(details below), but it does get the form above the fold and into what
we think may be the magic space for search forms, so it allows us to
get some feel for it. It's my feeling that to accommodate this form in
the same bar as the login links will require us to strip it back
dramatically and probably change the treatment of the login links too
- and that seemed to be too much speculative work, but again, some
thoughts below on how we might develop this.

My changes can be pulled from
git://github.com/mackerski/openstreetmap-website.git and are, given my
decision not to redesign the form, very tiny. A live (ish, map display
is very slow and confined to Ireland) and functional version can be
seen at:
http://dev1.openstreetmap.ie/

...but maybe somebody has a spare instance running somewhere and can
pull the changes into that.

Anyway, my observations:

* Subjectively, this location of the search form is not sufficiently
high up to be Where You Expect. And I don't think we can improve that
without encroaching on the login links.

* This location obscures the layer picker. I'm not so sad about that,
because I think the current picker is very unintuitive for newbies and
that we should consider alternatives, but that's another day's work...

* If we were to allow a search form to overlay the map in this way, it
should ideally be smaller and have hide/restore options.

* "Where am I?" probably doesn't belong beside the search form.
Indeed, it should probably be called something along the lines of
"Where is this?", since many users (I did) will expect it to move the
map to their current location. I'm not sure where it should go, but
have notions of a bottom-of-map single line of text with details of
current location and a "refresh" button. The ideal would be for it to
update on zoom or pan, but perhaps that's a bit too much Nominatim
load for now.

* The usage examples could be removed from permanent display and
hidden behind a "?", "Usage" or "Examples" link or button, to appear
as a popup or layer.

* If we do decide that the examples and "Where am I?" link can be
ditched, the search form could revert to a single line and we could
try to accommodate it where the login links are now. I'd like to do
more work on this but am unexpectedly travelling tomorrow, so I can't
take it any further before tomorrow's meeting.

* The current search behaviour puts results in a left-hand sidebar.
The new location of the search field is very far away from this.
Furthermore, I don't think a right-hand placement of the sidebar is a
nice solution to this (though I haven't tried yet)

Travel permitting I'll participate in tomorrow's meeting, but I'll
review the minutes in any case. I do intend to continue to hack on
this, so let's see what ideas arise.

Cheers,
Dermot

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