[ZWeb] NZO Alpha Announcement

Jeffrey P Shell jeffrey@cuemedia.com
Sat, 5 Apr 2003 08:58:32 -0700


On Friday, April 4, 2003, at 07:44  PM, Simon Michael wrote:

> Jeffrey P Shell <jeffrey@cuemedia.com> writes:
>>>> Now there are all these extra headers and toolbars and links and
>>>> sub-sub-sub tables and question marks getting in the way of trying 
>>>> to
>>>> ascertain the current Zope release information.  Too many header 
>>>> bars
>
> Aha, Pieter's roadmap. Just a few random ideas -
>
> Sidnei, should the main page text be a notch or two bigger ?
> Right now it's the same as the very small left-side links.
>
> Of course a whole wiki (folder of wiki pages) isn't needed for that
> roadmap, you could just drop a Roadmap wiki page in the root folder.

Does this cause pollution of the root folder?  On Pieter's page, which 
was just copied from ZWiki.org, there were extra wiki names in the 
document.  I don't want 'PageMaintainers', 'PieterB', and 
'JeffreyShell' becoming new documents in the root of the site - the 
root should stay as clean as possible.  So, I'd want Wiki with all of 
the features turned off:

- Since it's a single page, we don't need umpteen format choices.   It 
should just be StructuredText with *no* Wiki links.

- Since it's just a single page, it doesn't need backlink navigation 
taking up real estate.

How possible is that?  I'll leave it as a standalone Wiki page if only 
people with high access (not even casual members) can cause it to spawn 
off new pages.  But it seems to me that if you turn off those features, 
you're losing a substantial part of the Wiki story and are only being 
left with a document that's relatively easy to edit over the web.  This 
is where I'm stuck with the question - at this point, why does it 
matter if it's a Wiki page?

> Would it be worth using a zwiki skin without the wiki header, at least 
> for
> these odd pages around the site ? They would look much more like the
> static pages.  Some of the wiki controls could move down to the footer 
> if
> needed.
>
> I think the stuff about ZWiki at the bottom doesn't need to be there.
>
> I think it's cool that Jeffrey put up an AlternateLayout to compare.  
> (If
> we had edit access, I'd have put up another.) This is one of wiki's
> strengths of course.
>
> I'm reminded of how Stephan's condensed roadmap on the zope 3 wiki 
> links
> to more detailed descriptions (via the section headings). Just a 
> thought,
> what do people think of this as a guiding principle for the links on 
> the
> left ? Ie, the section heading links (About Zope, Download..)  would
> generally bring up a page something like Roadmap or AlternateLayout or 
> the
> lower part of z3's FrontPage where links are presented in more detail.
>
>> Oh, how I miss reStrucutredText's automatic 
>> table-of-content-generation
>> abilities!
>
> You could do it with DTML. Cf http://zwiki.org/FAQs perhaps.

Over my dead body!  Outside of SQL methods, I never ever ever want to 
touch DTML again.  I don't even want it as a ZWiki page option.

Anyways, I don't want between-page content generation, but in-page.  
reST has a directive::

   .. contents::

That will get replaced with something like:

   - Zope 2

     - Zope 2.6 (Stable)
     - Zope 2.7 (In Development)

   - Zope 3

     - Zope X3
     - Zope 3.0

   - CMF
   - Other

Based on the headers in the document.  Pieter's Roadmap page has that 
bulleted list at the top saying "this document talks about the 
following".  What reST's `contents` directive does is automatically 
generate that list based on the structure of the document, with links 
to the subsections (and back!).  It's really cool, and great for 
writing longer detailed documents.  I wish and wish and wish that the 
Zope book had this feature.  Navigating the Advanced Page Templates 
page takes fortitude.

Anyways, I couldn't even fake the contents list with STX.  I tried 
doing::

   - "Zope 2":#zope2

   - "Zope 3":#zope3

And then later in the document having headers with (sigh) HTML::

   Zope 2 (stable) <a name="zope2"></a>

I don't know what went wrong here, but the links didn't go to the right 
place.  It might be a BASE HREF problem.

To see the in-document table of contents in action, see pages like:

http://docutils.sourceforge.net/tools/test.html
( source - http://docutils.sourceforge.net/tools/test.txt )