[Sigia-l] storing pattern libraries

[Ziya Oz]

Juan Ruiz:

> What we are trying to create a database of patterns that can be reused
> by the User Experience team as well as other web team members.

Therein lies the problem.

Who exactly will benefit from the adoption of these "patterns": designers or
developers? 

What may be convenient for prototyping purposes or expedient for quickly
getting a project deadline met for designers may not be the most efficient
choice for system or architectural considerations for developers at all.

If you're (also) not a developer, I wouldn't recommend that you make the
decision.

> Can you recommend of a tool to store pattern libraries?

Hmm. These Web 2.0ish libraries are really a bunch of text files. So
anything from a simple folder structure to a simple DB should suffice to
store them.

> At the moment, in our organization we are using Visio as the tool to create
> wireframes, sitemaps and workflows.

Well, that's different, because now you're talking presentation. Problem
with tools like Visio or PowerPoint is that they are largely static, whereas
much of these libraries are interactive/animated/etc., dependent on DHTML
and Ajax. It'd be hard to fully demo/browse these libraries in static tools.

So I'd keep it simple and store thumbnails/brief descriptions and URLs to
sources in an outliner, Excel or, really, a (bookmarks) web page.

-- 
Ziya

It depends.
If it didn't, you'd be out of a job.