[Zope3-dev] UI effort at Sprintathon

[Joachim Werner]

I'll make this one shorter. Promised ...

> The most stumbling block was a description what a site
> designer should do, and how this can be made simpler. In the things I
> wrote up, most actions where done by the site-developer, after a
> suggestion from Jim I added the InformationArchitect actor.

Would it be possible for you to put these use cases up in the web?

> In the things you wrote on the wiki, there was a complete mix of site
> managment, CMS managment and templating for actual
> website-presentations.

That's true. But I was just collecting stuff there. And personally I don't
see so many differences. Websites for site management still are websites. I
don't see a strict separation, at least from the technical point of view. A
visitor of a web site does of course have a different role than the site's
manager, but the technologies used to present screens in the browser to both
of them don't necessarily have to differ much. I'd just be more conservative
with using Javascript and the like for the website than for the website's
management screens. But this is only true for public sites. In intranets
(think groupware apps) one might be able to use almost the same level of
sophistication in the end user "UI" as for the management UI.

> In the search for the silver bullet, I thought
> about a technic to 'make' interfaces for these three fields with one
> logic model.

Right. That's one of the ways to go.

> And I do not believe that the PHP people have this model .
> What we see there, are great UI for a CMS. No UI for TTW component
> creation, no UI for the ZODB, no UI for application server managment.
> And the also have not solved the problem of reusabilty

Right. And the good thing is: The stuff that makes their CMS UIs so cool can
also be used for the other parts. They just don't see it that way. BTW: What
I've seen at Flying Dog is much more than just CMS. They are reusing their
technology for workflows, groupware apps, database frontends, etc.

> After some more discussion I got the impression, that we need to have
> different layers, where each layer can have it's own logic model. With
> logic model I mean for example the difference between component-,
> content-object-, content-type-centric views. These different models
> 'can' build on each others technics, but they do not need to. For
> example the schema technics can probably be reused. So perhaps it would
> be good to define first these layers, although this might look
> 'academic' :-).

It is academic. But it might be necessary to be academic there. I just don't
want people to be academic first and look at the real world later ;-)

> Your critic, that the Z2 managment views can not be reused is right. But
> do we really want to reuse the managment views for a CMS, I think not.
> What we want is to reuse some of the functionality, not the view itself.
> And this functionality should be reusable in different logic models.

Right. And that's what is virtually impossible in Zope 2 ...

> I can not make suggestions, what should be done during the sprint, but
> from the last announcements, it seems to me that the first mentioned
> focus on CMS is bluring towards general Z3 issues.

Well, if it's Z3 issues that are raised by people who want to build CMS,
that might not be a bad thing in general ;-)

Joachim