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

Martijn Faassen faassen@vet.uu.nl
Wed, 13 Nov 2002 14:14:33 +0100


Janko Hauser wrote:
[snip]
> Perhaps the parallel announcement of the sprint and the
> ContentManagementProjectsForZope3 mixed up to much, and many of the
> people coming to the sprint think the result of the sprint is the basis
> of the next Zope CMS. At least my thinking up to now was more focused on
> the needed interface structure for a new CMS. The goals described at the
> ZopeTop page are clearly focusing on the managment interface for the
> ZODB. I hope that everybody understands, that I see these interfaces a
> little apart. The former builds atop or parallel to the second.

Well, the sprint will have a focus on content management related 
infrastructure, but we're not going to build a Zope 3 CMS during
this sprint. There's far too much not done yet. I introduced the UI
project as I felt this is a necessary part of Zope 3 too, but it is
not directly related to CMS activities.

> > 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?

> I can only suggest to not give up this part, because an understandable
> TTW view on Zope3 is very important to make many of the new concepts
> already implemented into Zope3 less abstract. This will lower the
> barrier for new developers.

If not more people step up and takes an active part in this I think we should
cancel the project however (but what then? it needs to be done!). We'll
give it some more time.

> > 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).

> These things are needed for putting content into the system, not for
> managing objects, services and programming logic. They are a part of
> complex document objects, which are not discussed, defined or
> implemented yet.

I realize this. I didn't mean we're going to implement these editors on
top of Zope 3. I meant that this shows that even people who focus on
client side complicated dynamic applications have a lot of trouble making them
work and work cross browser. I don't think with the current interest and
expertise level in the Zope 3 community (at least at the sprint) we can do 
this well at all. Unless we have a few unexpected DHTML experts showing up, 
but they've remained very quiet until now.

People like to talk about DHTML and the like is the future for web applications
and how Zope 3 should have something like that. I agree. But we don't have
the ability to go beyond talk now, apparently.

We do however have quite a bit of knowledge of HTML and CSS. So let's 
use that knowledge.

[snip]
> >           * 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. :)
> > 
> This is a huge task, and after all the bashing of the current Zope2 ZMI,
> who want's to take this responsibilty :-)

I didn't mean we should have the same person doing both groups. We should
just people taking charge of one group or the other and then of course
they should focus the tasks some more.

Regards,

Martijn