[Zope3-dev] Re: New Software Space UI

[Paul Everitt]

I agree with Jim's point about asking more basic questions.  First and 
foremost, is this UI aimed at someone who already knows the CA or 
doesn't?  And regarding their sophistication, is this someone more like 
Stephan or, errr, more like me? :^)

If it is someone more like me, and someone that might not have learned 
the CA yet, perhaps we have to take one step farther back.

At the EuroPython sprint in Sweden, Jim encouraged a couple of us to 
find two people that represented the Site Manager (or Site Developer) 
audience.  We did, and we asked them some questions.  Alas, their needs 
were steered largely in the direction of content management services ("I 
need a simple way to find my workflows, my metadata definitions, etc.")

Still, thinking back on that conversation, I really doubt this actor 
would say: "What I *really* need is a simple way to add a utility." 
IMO, they aren't going to know the relationships between utilities, 
adapters, multi-adapters, interfaces, etc.  They might understand views, 
or at least pages (but likely not the class that is bound to a page as 
the controller).  They might also understand modules, but that sounds a 
bit risky too.

After Sweden, I wrote up some use cases and did a UI mockup and sent it 
to one of the people we interviewed.  They liked it, but I still felt it 
was a failure for two reasons:

1) It was functional, but for content management.  It isn't clear to me 
that this is a good line of reasoning for Zope 3, which is bigger than 
CMS.  Alas, we'll have a hard time finding non-CMS "Site Managers" to 
help us, and even if we do, we might have a hard time find similar patterns.

2) I personally don't understand the total zen of interfaces, adapaters, 
utilities, views, and friends.  The big picture is overwhelming.  I'd 
still like to help on various little pictures, if someone else manages 
the big picture.

--Paul

Jim Fulton wrote:
> Stephan Richter wrote:
> 
>> Hello everyone,
>>
>> as you might know, I am in the process of completing the Component 
>> Architecture simplification work by removing the concept of services 
>> as well as the view API (though views were converted to adapters 
>> already). Also, the concept of a site manager will become a much more 
>> central concept as it holds both, the adapter and utility registry, 
>> and provides basically the local Component Architecture API.
>>
>> Once I am done with the Python work, the Web UI will need some major 
>> refactoring as well. However, I am not good with UIs or more 
>> specifically, I really do not know what users expect from it. Thus I 
>> wanted to ask you guys how you would like the UI to behave from a 
>> functional point of view. Maybe answering the following questions 
>> might help:
>>
>> 1. What do you like about the current way of configuring components 
>> through the Web UI?
>>
>> 2. What do you *not* like in the current UI?
>>
>> 3. Is the "Tools" tab helpful? How could it be improved or should it 
>> be removed?
>>
>> 4. What tasks do you most frequently complete in Software 
>> Configuration space?
> 
> 
> I think it would be more useful to ask more basic questions.  I think the
> current UI is mostly a failure and should not be used as a baseline.
> 
> I better questions are questions like:
> 
> - What would be a useful way to create, manage, and configure utilities
>   through the web?
> 
> - What would be a useful way to create, manage, and configure adapters
>   through the web?
> 
> - What would be a useful way to create, manage, and configure views
>   through the web?  This is a little bit different than adapters because 
> of the
>   use of templates.
> 
> Two partial sucesses in the current UI, IMO, are:
> 
> - Through-the-web modules.  These are currently broken for largely
>   shallow reasons. I think, however, that the concept that through-the-web
>   Python code should be managed as modules is sound.
> 
> - Page folders allow designers to work on templates without having to
>   do configuration themselves. Basically, a page folder is configured
>   once with a default configuration and any templates added to it
>   get that configuration.
> 
> Finally, it's worth reviwing the goals for through-the-web configuration
> and development:
> 
> - Through-the-web configuration is convenient in some ways.  It lets people
>   configure their site without resorting to ZCML.  If done well, this is 
> a big
>   win. (It is currently done so badly that it makes ZCML look easy to 
> use. ;)
> 
> - Through-the-web configuration is currently necessary for components that
>   store state in ZODB.  We will find some way around this in the future.
> 
> - Through-the-web prototyping, if done well, could be very convenient.  
> It allows
>   things to be tried out quickly without restarting and without 
> resorting to
>   brittle/partial reload schemes.  My vision is that, after initially 
> prototyping
>   something TTW, it will be possible to automatically generate a 
> file-system
>   based package from the prototype.
> 
> Jim
>