Well, I admit that I've been rather latent with providing any progress on the node creation mockup stuff, and I do apologize... it hasn't necessarily been for lack of effort.

I've drawn up (by hand) a number of node creation scenarios that I will be mocking up shortly, but they're not yet online.

In the meantime, I wanted to provide an intermediate mockup and get some more feedback.

Please note that I've revised this post with an additional mockup.

Take a look and leave a comment (or just reply to this thread):

Some things to note:

• Make this message private is the same thing as saving the post as a
  draft; if someone wants to give me more feedback on this, I’d
  appreciate it
• The categories look fairly nice now: they’re out of the way and more subtle
• There’s a more generous composition area
• If you toggle excerpt, a hidden field is revealed that allows you to create a custom snippet
• The link “formatting codes” is context dependent and changes based on whatever you’ve selected in the dropdown box.
• Attach may become a separate tab, but Basecamp puts these below the compose area and it works out really nicely… It makes it easy to add multiple files or work with one file at a time. Check out the steps.
• Note that the submit button is now context sensitive: since we’re creating a blog entry, the button says “Post this entry” instead of the generic (and boring) “Submit”.

More changes to v2

Notes on these changes:

There are some subtle but important changes in this version.

First, the excerpt field has been toggled "on". There was previously some confusion about excerpt vs. teaser and hopefully this will clear that up. I envision the excerpt being the short summary that gets sent out to RSS feeds being customizable... if you don't toggle/change the field, the first 200 words or whatever get used. This feature replaces the current need to use but has nothing to do with what others have called "teasers". As you can see from the inline explanatory text, it should be obvious to the composer how the excerpt is used.

Second, I've added a new content type switcher found in SilverOrange's intranet. In fact, this makes complete sense for Drupal and will eventually, I think, become indisposable. What this allows you to do is switch from one node type to another. This will supplement or replace the current "Create content" listing in the admin menu. It should only show up when there is more than one content type, of course.

I've also cleared up the wording on a number of items, especially the former "Make this post private" link. This now reads "This post is a draft" and will add the post to your drafts queue.

Hopefully this further clarifies some of my ideas for blog post creation.

Anyway, thoughts are welcome!

Chris