[Zope3-dev] [DRAFT] local portlets and perspectives

[Jean-Marc Orliaguet]

Jim Fulton wrote:

> Jean-Marc Orliaguet wrote:
> ...
>
>> This is what I meant with having a "unifying concept". And that sounds
>> very unifying to me already.
>
>
> Perspectives, if I understand how you are describing them, and how
> Eclipse describes them,
> http://www.eclipse.org/articles/using-perspectives/PerspectiveArticle.html,
>
> are simple separate applications.  They are different ways of working
> on content
> based on tasks.  They could be provided with perspectives, or, more
> simply,
> with different collections of web pages, using different styles.  I
> don't understand the benefit you think they provide nor do I see how
> they unify anything.


I've read the article, it is clear to me that the main idea is to be
able to reuse components, not to create a collection of web pages just
to present an application from a slightly different perspective. With 3
master pages and a set of 5 perspectives you get 15 combinations. That
would be 15 pages in html to maintain.

The main idea is to define visibility in a coherent way, not with a
series of CSS hacks (hidden {display:none}), <div
tal:condition="not:first_login" >...</div>, <img tal:condition="python:
current_path.startswith('/section/news')">, scattered around 100 page
templates... or by using visibility conditions in the portlets own code.

the assumption is that portlet visibility is not a propriety of
*individual* portlets, but this is something that is related to some
activity of the user, or some usage context.

I think that Eric summarized this quite clearly in his blog:

"""
What for ?

Imagine that when writing a new component, you also can easily define
perspective. Let's take an example : a blog application. Well you can
define a "Blog Perspective" that would be activated when accessing to a
blog and that would arrange the portal to offer a "blog view" putting
portlets in right places. WIth this and the whole CPSSkins machinery, it
would be very easy to define interfaces that can adapt to user's activity.
The same approach would also work for webmail, calendar, collaborative
work, personal portal dashboard, etc. The application would then only
define portlets and perspectives (no more pages, view, whatever :-).
>From the user point of view, it would really improve the usability and
how it the portal can adapt itself to his need. The user would also be
albe to define its own perspectives (like it's dashboard) and switch
between them.

It would be new approach in the design of web applications, that would
allow to think them as user-oriented applications and not as a chains of
html pages.

"""

The idea is to move away from the website approach to designing web
applications, with the endless poliferation of templates and macros. I
fully agree though that this is a change from the page / view approach.

/JM