ArtistPageRedesign

This Page is Glorious History!

The content of this page either is bit-rotted, or has lost its reason to exist due to some new features having been implemented in MusicBrainz, or maybe just described something that never made it in (or made it in a different way), or possibly is meant to store information and memories about our Glorious Past.

We still keep this page to honor the brave editors who, during the prehistoric times (prehistoric for you, newcomer!), struggled hard to build a better present and dreamed of an even better future. We also keep it for archival purposes because possibly it still contains crazy thoughts and ideas that may be reused someday. If you're not into looking at either the past or the future, you should just disregard entirely this page content and look for an up to date documentation page elsewhere.

The Artist Page Redesign

The artist pages keep accumulating more and more data and thus are expensive to load for both the database and the users. AdvancedRelationships, ArtistAnnotations and the ever growing number of albums, singles, compilations and bootlegs make it more difficult for users to find what they are interested in.

IMHO, the artist page (showartist.html) has to be split into several smaller pages which display only a subset of the available data that is easier to read for users. The pages would contain powerful user configurable ordering options (order by release date, name etc.).

The planned structure below is already the second version. It is the result of a discussion I had with DaveEvans. --MatthiasFriedrich

Rob and Keschte's Notes

To-Do's

(Old) To-Do's

RFE

Planned implementation

Main Artist Page (default page)

This page is displayed instead of the old showartist.html page. It contains:

Release Page

The release page contains several subpages. Each subpage is a filter that only displays a subset of the releases available for an artist.

Official Discography
Bootlegs
Various Artists Contributions
Uncategorized
User Selected

This page contains a filter/order configuration tool. It can be used to select the release status (Official, Promotion, Bootleg, "none") and the order the releases are displayed (by name, type, release date, or a set of criteria). All of the above preset pages can be emulated.

Tracks

This page contains a list of all tracks by a certain artist and the releases they appear on. It is a help to find inconsistent track titles and has been requested in some RFE.

Discussion

This is a great idea. Without trying to put too much on this plate, something that will need to happen after the AR data starts getting populated is that users will want to see listings of the releases and tracks where the artists is featured through an AR link as a performer, composer, etc. in the same way as the releases where he/she is the primary artist. While this work doesn't have to implement the complete solution to the AR artist problem, it is probably a good idea to be thinking about it as you do the design. @alex

Another thing is that some AR data may want to be specially displayed. For example, you could take the URL for an artist AR "image" (artist has a picture at URL) relationship and actually display a randomly chosen URL of that type (there may be more than one) for the artist in a picture box that could replace the artist icon. @alex

Something I came to think about while discussing the DJ-mix AR; What about the ability to flag an artist as usually having a specific role? An artist might primarily be a (for instance)

Other tabs would be available too of course, this is just about the default one shown when first chosing an artist to look at.

I'm not even sure if I think it's a good idea or not, just something that popped up in my head. //bnw

Open questions

What about

CategoryDevelopment CategoryHistory

last edited 2008-02-15 08:14:32 by dmppanda

MusicBrainz web site  *  Support / Contact