[Zope3-dev] Re: Bug 358/359, 367 fixed

[Paul Winkler]

On Fri, Feb 25, 2005 at 10:38:56AM +0000, Chris Withers wrote:
> ... End users will likely have a custom interface built fo rthem by 
> developers. It would be very useful if, in building that UI, developers 
> could re-use components from the zmi, which is currently prettymuch 
> impossible in Zope 2.

Indeed. Think of something like CMF, where most users never see the
ZMI, only developers and administrators. The problem for me is that
we often need to let users do "one more little thing" which is
handled out-of-the-box by the ZMI, which means either giving them
full access to the ZMI or writing a new UI for the task.
There is no middle road; I can't re-use nice bits of the ZMI for
the CMF UI.

So, unless I have time to write CMF-level UIs for everything my users
ever need to do, I end up having to train them to use two
UIs:  the CMF UI and the ZMI.  This is confusing and burdensome
to them. Once in the ZMI they inevitably start discovering all
kinds of "wrong" ways to do things - e.g. tweaking content 
without going through workflow.

If it were practical to re-use bits of the Z2 ZMI, I would be
much happier with Z2. In practice, it's nearly all or nothing.

-- 

Paul Winkler
http://www.slinkp.com