[Zope3-dev] Pagelets and UI (was: IsarSprint topics - Zope 3 application components)

[Joe Geldart]

On Mon, 13 Sep 2004 01:47:10 +0200, dev wrote:


> You can declare pagelets in every instance. 
> The user (principal) can sort them and enable or disable.
> 

Sorry to be blunt, but that sounds hideous from a usability perspective.
Usually a specific order is desired (even across pagelet declarations in
multiple configuration files.) Our (Netalley Networks') pagelets allow
this through the 'weight' property on the pagelet directive. Do your
pagelets/tiks have something similar?

Regarding my comment that they're horrible from a usability perspective.
We use our pagelets to render the entire page (including the logo and
navigation) so that the content and flow order on a page can be chosen.
This is important for CSS and accessibility reasons. ECMAScript cannot be
relied upon in all(any?) user agents and we don't wish to require it at
such a low level. Your system's UI sounds better suited for portlets
rather than pagelets. We envisage at some point in the future a portlet
system built as a pagelet, but we recognise that they are *very* different
use-cases and neither is satisfied by the other.

I believe we'd benefit from having the Tiks *portlet* system built as a
pagelet that admins can include in various page regions using just the
pagelet directive in their ZCML. This, I feel, would allow us to meet both
sets of use-cases and would put each technology in its rightful place.
Pagelets aren't suited to doing portlets, portlets aren't suited to doing
pagelets.

Regards,
-- 
Joe Geldart, Senior Partner
Netalley Networks LLP
http://www.netalleynetworks.com