[Grok-dev] ZMI 'light' feature requests

[Brandon Craig Rhodes]

Uli Fouquet <uli at gnufix.de> writes:

> what features would you like to see in the grok UI, if the standard
> ZMI would not be available anymore?
>
> - Tree-like object browser for the ZODB (including listing of views,
>   registrations, contexts and non-grok objects etc.).

I know that the Django people get lots of mileage in their
presentations out of the fact that their admin interface allows raw
editing of objects once the Schema has been defined.  They talk about
getting a late-evening requirement that a database of state employee
salaries be available at something like 6am the next morning, when
newspapers start hitting people's doorsteps.  Thanks to their Admin UI
having a dumb-but-working form-based raw-object editor, they took ten
minutes to define the database schema, then could immediately have the
reporter with the data start entering in the raw information by hand
for the next hour, while the Web guys concentrated on creating the
front-end that would let readers search and sort the data when the
news story hit the next morning.

For situations where data only needs to be entered once, or where data
that is normally not editable might in an emergency need to be quickly
corrected by an administrator on a live site, an object editor that
opens up its instance variables and lets you set them can be a
lifesaver.

Or so I've heard.

In Django presentations.

They were probably exaggerating.  But still.

-- 
Brandon Craig Rhodes   brandon at rhodesmill.org   http://rhodesmill.org/brandon