DevHome Future (was Re: [ZWeb] FYI: Back to the past)

[Jeffrey P Shell]

I'm especially interested in reigning in the Projects/Fishbowl area 
into something truely usable.  I've been trying to keep the Zope 2.6 
and 2.7 project wikis up to date as I spot information that should go 
in them, even though I'm not involved with the actual projects much, in 
an effort to make the project area more trustworthy (ie - so people 
curious about the status of Zope 2.6.xbx and when a final release is 
due might actually find that information, if it exists at all;).

Are there any plans for revamping the Fishbowl?  I'd like to see the 
proposals page(s) move away from being a wiki.  I think that Proposal 
can be a specialized CMF Document, with the ability to comment (since a 
proposal is also, essentially, a request for comments).  They would 
have a different workflow (ie "Technical Review State", "Awaiting 
Resources State") similar to the ad-hoc wikibadges used now, but with 
more meaning and (hopefully) greater enforcement.  Proposals might have 
extra meta/header data similar to PEP's (ie - expected zope version, 
"replaces", etc).  Local Roles or other permission settings can be used 
to allow a degree of collaboration that the proposal's author is 
comfortable with.  I think this will yield a fishbowl that is easier to 
keep clean, again giving it some degree of trust.

For proposals which are accepted and become a part of the Zope core, or 
are other types of ongoing Zope related projects (like ZODB), we could 
continue with the model we have now where a Project is essentially 
given a Wiki, collector, or whatever the project leader is comfortable 
with using for collaboration during the lifetime of the project.  I 
imagine many accepted proposals won't require becoming projects, and 
that Projects will tend to be large-scale things to collaborate Zope 
releases or site rebuilds :).  Projects may even elect to maintain 
their own proposals within the scope of that project.

Comments relating to the latest designs follow:

On Thursday, February 20, 2003, at 06:51  AM, Paul Everitt wrote:

>
> Howdy.  Sidnei and I were on IRC a while today, going through some of 
> the points brought up so far.
>
> Sidnei found the old home page we had done, which included a lot of 
> the results from the IA (information architecture) discussion.  He 
> also found the search results page I had done, which had the Google 
> look.
>
> Take another look at:
>
>   http://dev.nzo.zope.org/
>
> First, be patient, as some things are quite broken.  So for now, 
> please don't mention the broken things.  But some things to consider:
>
> 1) The multi-column layout that George mentioned.
>
> 2) Specifically, the time-sensitive, always-fresh stuff scrolling 
> through on the right.
>

This column needs to stand out differently.  Right now, the page is 
really hard to read because there are a lot of boxes, and a lot of 
black text on white (which generally, I like, but as of Feb 20 11:43 am 
MST, my eyes just swirl around the page, unable to focus.  Rules of 
composition!).

The www.zope.ch page has nicer boundaries and is easier to read (even 
though I don't understand the language).  The difference is subtle, but 
could end up being quite significant.  (UPDATE: This seems to be due to 
Plone's "editing box" that shows up around content when logged in.  The 
lines that it puts on the page around the content section seem to be 
the worst offender of the page composition problems.  When they're 
gone, the columns look a *little* more natural.  Better boundaries 
still need to be put on the right hand side, and/or the really long 
left-hand column needs to shed some weight.)

> 3) Under "Info for", our attempt to say to people, "If you are one of 
> the following audiences, start here."

Good idea - I'd make the "New Users", "Product Developers", etc links 
stand out a bit more, either by being bold and/or a bit larger.  Or 
more padding between the cells might be needed.

> 4) Do a search for "xml" or some other search term, you can see the 
> search results.  (Sidnei and I already discussed the need for 
> extracting a "description" when there isn't one available.)
>
> 5) Perhaps most important, the navigation box has a hierarchy of 
> "sections" that conform to the SiteOrganization page discussion:
>
>   http://dev.nzo.zope.org/projects/nzo/SiteOrganization
>
> The idea: break the big content pile problem into smaller piles called 
> sections, and get people to own and garden the sections.
>
> Not much is in the wiki, but we made a lot of progress on the mailing 
> list and IRC appointments at the time.

The wiki won't be helpful (which only adds fuel to my grumpy arguments 
;) if this information doesn't get fed back in.