[Zope3-dev] Moving more stuff to zope.products

[Philipp von Weitershausen]

Hi there,

in the currently ongoing process of reorganizing Zope3's package 
structure and gutting out zope.app, I think the main packages that have 
yet to be moved are:

- zope.app.workflow
- zope.app.content
- browser skins

While the first is probably easy to agree on, I realize that the latter 
could be a point of discussion.

Anthony Baxter argued that just moving zope.app.content to 
zope.products.content will not flatten the product hierarchy at all. 
That is certainly true since the depth of the package remains the same, 
however the package hierarchy will be straightened out a lot. Remember 
how all interfaces are in zope.app.interfaces.content, all browsers 
views are in zope.app.browser.content...? (see discussion several months 
ago...)
 From a philosophical point of view, content objects are custom to any 
application. I have application where I never need Folder, File or weird 
(forbidden?) stuff like Templated Page. Thus, one could argue that all 
optional stuff belongs in zope.products, not in the core.

The same essential argument applies to the browser skins. Here, it makes 
even more sense, because a browser skin is usually the first thing a 
developer will customize in his/her own application anyway. By marking 
them as optional by moving them zope.products, we encourage people to 
actually do so. Otherwise we'll end up with the Plone dilemma, in which 
every Plone site looks like plone.org, at least very similar.

There's another practical point for the skins. zope.products packages 
are required to have a specified maintainer. IMO, the skins, especially 
ZopeTop, have been not been taken care of enough recently. I think we 
all agree that the UI needs more attention, something that a dedicated 
maintainer of the skins package could be responsible of.

Looking-for-comments-ly,

Philipp