[Zope3-dev] RFC: ViewDirectoryHierarchyReorganization

Martijn Faassen faassen@vet.uu.nl
Tue, 26 Nov 2002 12:10:38 +0100


Shane Hathaway wrote:
> Martijn Faassen wrote:
> >In order to make life easier for web developers getting into Zope 3,
> >I've made a proposal to drastically review the way views (in particular
> >browser views) are currently organized physically. The full story
> >is here:
> >
> >http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/ComponentArchitecture/ViewDirectoryHierarchyReorganization
> >
> >Please comment!
> 
> I like this proposal.  But are you referring to web developers 
> maintaining their own sites, or are you referring to web developers 
> maintaining Zope 3 source code?  If the former, you don't want web 
> developers to modify the Zope 3 source to maintain their own sites.  If 
> the latter, they probably need to get to know Zope 3 pretty intimately 
> anyway.

The latter; I'd just like to reduce the amount of intimacy as a first
step. While a pretty detailed understanding is necessary, right now I 
think there's too much too fast.

> I'll assume you're speaking of the former case (web developers 
> maintaining their own sites).  In that case, I think we want to give web 
> developers a "sandbox" of some sort to do their work, apart from the 
> Zope 3 source.  The sandbox might take the form of a web UI, or it might 
> take the form of a directory on the filesystem which they are allowed to 
> modify.

Yes. But I was speaking about the latter. Sorry I did not make this
more clear. :)

> We expect in the future that Python developers will "check out" and 
> "check in" code to ZODB.  So here's an idea: perhaps web developers 
> could do the same thing, but with templates and graphics rather than 
> code.  In fact, read-only interface documentation might be included as 
> part of the checkout.
> 
> What do you think?

I think this is a good idea.

Anyway, my proposal was for a first step that we can take *quickly* to 
empower people constructing the Zope 3 user interface; I expect a lot 
of those will not be expert python programmers. Or at least they shouldn't
be wearing the expert python programmer hat while dealing with 
user interfaces. The directory hierarchy navigation skills are in 
a sense a 'dead chicken' in Zope 3. :)

Regards,

Martijn