[Zope3-dev] UI effort at Sprintathon

[Martijn Faassen]

Hi there,

More sprintathon news!

I'd like to suggest we split off a team to discuss and implement
a Zope 3 UI at the sprintathon; the UI issue seems to have stalled
and we will have some good people with ideas about the UI at the 
Sprintathon (for instance Alexander Limi). This is not so much about
a cool looking design but about UI functionality for the various target
audiences for Zope 3 (ranging from programmers to content managers). 

A team of 3 or 4 people perhaps assisted by a few programmers for technical
support could get quite a bit done in a short time. What could such a team
work on?

First, it's important to focus on the target audience. While
it's a content management sprintathon Zope 3's UI is immature enough to
allow a focus on basically any target audience (or even all; I imagine
by default there are some common style elements shared by all the UIs).

I suggest an important target audience is Zope 3 developers -- make it
as easy as possible for us developers to come up with easy to use
user interfaces.
  
Without actual programming:

  * beginnings of a style guide

  * CSS stylesheets

  * sample HTML

Then to put this actually into use, so us programmers can start applying
it:

  * adapting zope 3 so it will use the core styles (this includes simple
    adaptations of most objects as well as general navigation interface).

  * implementation of some more complicated user interfaces as examples
    for other user interfaces.

  * Perhaps a good project is to work on an easy TTW way to create and manage
    views composed mostly out of page templates and some python scripts
    in Zope 3. I'm thinking about a pattern in use in Silva here, but I'm
    sure CMF people will have some input. But this is just my suggestion.

I'm *not* one of the people going to be on the UI team, by the way; I'm a 
programmer who thinks UI is important, but I'm not a UI designer. I hope 
someone will step up and be the UI team project leader. Note that this also
means project leader before and after the sprintathon, not just during,
unless you can find someone to take over from you.

Regards,

Martijn