[Zope3-dev] DISCUSS: Consolidation of Zope 3 UI wiki pages

[Martijn Faassen]

Paul Everitt wrote:
[snip]
> I suppose this means that the do-ers need to get together.  I'm not  
> sure who are the do-ers on the UI effort, and I'm not sure who is  
> spearheading the effort.  I'm afraid we'll show up at your place and  
> spend the first few days rehashing previous territory.

I have the exact same worry as you do, Paul; as it looks now there'll
be some UI guys getting together rehashing how much of DHTML/stylesheets/
mozilla/etc to use for Zope 3. This could easily become a 5 day
philosophical session. That is not good.

I introduced the UI group because I think a good UI for Zope 3 is
important. While Zope's ZMI has many limitations, it does provide for an
easy entry into Zope and I think is responsible for a large part of it
doing well with non-programmers.

I had hoped someone would step up to lead this effort, but nobody did.
Perhaps we should cancel it and move the people into some other project?

Anyway, I'm not going to take charge, as it's not my topic and I
don't expect to have the time. But this is my opinion:

  * fancy stuff later. We'll assume none of us has enough knowledge of
    fancy DHTML and Mozilla integration to actually make much progress
    on it during the sprint, so we won't do it. Infrae's experience with
    fancy client side stuff like Bitflux or Xopus is this is simply
    not yet ready for production, anyway (at least not in any cross 
    browser way).

    We can always add in fancy DHTML stuff later (we want to), but now we need 
    concrete action. So we'll focus on plain old HTML + CSS keeping 
    javascript supplementing in mind. People who want to discuss mozilla XUL 
    anyway can go sit in another room. :)

  * We should focus on developing the core of a 'ZopeTop' or ZMI and for
    the target audiences as described in the ZopeTop wiki page, with the
    focus on SiteDevelopers and SiteManagers (and an 'underwater view'
    for advanced content managers, perhaps).

  I think we can have two groups at the sprint:

    * Design and document the next generation ZMI. This is a documentation
      effort (quite a bit of which may be science fiction) with a UI      
      focus. What do the various roles want to do? Pick the minds of   
      Jim and Steve and work out what the UI should look like, on   
      paper and HTML mockups. Work together with the documentation group.
      There's a ton of services, ways to hook up components, etc, 
      and they need good UIs. UI requirements will most certainly 
      inform the design of these services as well, I am convinced.

    * The style guide group. Ideally I as a programmer want to be able to
      write dirt-simple HTML and have it look pretty in Zope 3, because of
      the magic of CSS and the like. Possibly there will also be something
      on a componentized GUI (what Shane has been talking about -- has
      Shane written something detailed about this philosophy yet? we should
      look it up if so).

      The style guide people will:

          * create HTML mockups and CSS stylesheets

          * Write down how we should be using various UI widgets;
            a user interface guide like exists for Mac etc.

          * Start modifying Zope 3 so it follows the style guide.    
            This includes the existing page templates as well as the
            current forms implementation.

Someone should step up to lead both groups. Both groups will have a
strong overlap with especially the documentation effort. I think this is
an important insight, myself. :)

Over half of the people who signed up for the sprintathon have not apparently
displayed the slightest of activity in advance yet. I hope they will start
doing so soon, otherwise this will be a wasted opportunity. :( The good
thing is that we have a reasonable core of people who did display
activity, it's just I don't know what to do with everybody else. Perhaps
we should ask the Sint to put them in the empty toy sack and take them away to
Spain. :)

Regards,

Martijn