[ZWeb] NZO / Plone / etc

Chris Withers chrisw@nipltd.com
Tue, 25 Feb 2003 11:02:52 +0000


Sorry for picking this up late...

Sidnei da Silva wrote:
> | """
> | Another thing: We are using a Plone-based site.
> | """
> | ...so what happened to the "stock-CMF" interface?
> 
> That line should've read 'We are using a Plone-based site for the pre-alpha'.

Is the stock interface really going to happen or are people paying lip service?

> | My biggest concern with NZO is that Sidnei needed to make this comment:
> | """
> | I would like to hear only suggestions and no 'I hate Plone' emails
> | """
> 
> Theres is no one sending those emails apart from the well-known ones.

And how many of them are those? ;-)

This statement doesn't tie with something you said on the OzZope list:

> Even worse, the people that commented on it did it only
 > as to complain about Plone.

...

> Im working hardly to fix those issues while not breaking Plone
> upgradeability.

What has been done to ensure that Plone is upgradeable?

> Im doing this by providing a ploneCustom.css file and
> a image for the logo. As you may notice, NZO looks a lot different
> from Plone right now, and its was not that hard to do that.

Sorry, but it's practically identical...

> Im just
> overriding a few css styles. 

...because you've only overridden a few CSS styles.

> Depends on how much effort the community is willing to put into. I
> know that theres a lot of people out there that know how to do
> cross-browser CSS and could volunteer. Unfortunately Im not good at
> anything but Python.

But aren't you being paid to do this stuff?

> | - column heading click-to-sort not actually clicking to sort. Since it's 
> | done with JS, it only sorts what's on the page, not the whole set as it 
> | should.
> 
> I dont understand what you meant to say here.

Hmm, it doesn't apply to NZO by the looks of it:
http://dev.nzo.zope.org/Wikis/folder_contents
...should really be batched. If it was, the clickable column headings would only 
sort the current batch, not the whole list of contents. This is very counter 
intuitive.

> | - No link highlighting. There are lots of links which are neither 
> | highlighted by a different colour or by underlining.
> 
> That can be fixed. How would you like to see this? Just tell me what
> you want and Ill do it.

I see this has been fixed, cool :-)

> I have done more than 8 sites using different workflows with Plone in
> the last months.

I'm more concerned about what happens when you come back to those sites in a 
year's time.

> In fact, the workflow
> works better with Plone because you have only one Page Template/Python
> Script to change transitions.

...it's a shame you guys chose to build that functionality in Plone rather than 
modifying DCWorkflow :-(

> I would like to say again that NZO look-n-feel will only be as good as
> *I* am able to do it if there are no volunteers. I feel comfortable on
> targetting IE 5.5+ and Mozilla as browsers.

I think that is a mistake. I can live without Netscape, although we really 
should support it, at least version six. However, things like Lynx really need 
to be considered. And there's still a lot of IE 5.0 around... Has anyone tried 
with IE 6?

> even in Opera right now. Anybody that doesnt wants to upgrade to at
> least these versions of browsers is willing to take the risk of not
> being able to see some sites and be vulnerable to security issues. 

I've read many such things eminating from Redmond. It's a shame to see those 
coming from the Zope camp too :-(

Anyway, more issues:

1.
http://dev.nzo.zope.org/Members/chrisw/Squishdot
...what happened to the STX rendering?

2.
Searching for both "Squishdot" and "Zope AND DTML" took way too long to bring 
back a result. How can we make it faster?

3.
What's with all the links to http://dev.nzo.zope.org/#? I'm guessing there's 
some nasty Javascript going on somewhere. It doesn't work from subtrees...
Go to http://dev.nzo.zope.org/Wikis/Docs and click on "About Zope"
What's wrong with normal links?!

4.
Well, we're using the CMF now, so I can put any skin item name on the end of a 
URL and have it found. Are we happy for people to be able to see the following:
http://dev.nzo.zope.org/Wikis/folder_contents
http://dev.nzo.zope.org/content_byline
..etc..

That said, the site is starting to look passable now so keep up the good work :-)

cheers,

Chris