[Zope3-dev] Site configuration UI (was New Software Space UI)

[Stephan Richter]

On Saturday 08 January 2005 04:46, Paul Everitt wrote:
> (Changing the thread title to focus on one part of the problem.)
>
> At EuroPython I took some notes from the afternoon session we spent with
> a couple of site managers:
>
>    http://www.zope-europe.org/articles/200501/z3scripternotes
>
> After that, I took some notes which I rewrote based on this discussion
> (primarily, pulling out the site developer stuff):
>
>    http://www.zope-europe.org/articles/200501/zope3devdiscussion
>
> I need to put more info there, but I'll likely move it to the zope3 wiki
> if it is worth continuing??

I really, really like these initial notes, especially the latter link/

> Finally, I realized that CMF and Plone (perhaps CPS too, need to ask
> Florent) have facilities for TTW site configuration.  I made a 3.4 Mb
> narrated Flash movie as a tour of the Plone UI for site management:
>
>
> http://zea.zope-europe.org/~paul/movies/z3siteman/z3siteman_media/z3siteman
>.swf

The sound did not work on my machine (it usually does), but I got the point. 
Plone Setup is very nice indeed. I would very much appreciate, if you could 
keep working on a Zope 3 UI of this kind. I will implement any screen you 
throw at me. 

In the mean-time, however, I have to get something going, so I can finish the 
project I am working on. I will concentrate on the Python Developer. Once we 
get both UIs working, we will think about a way of enabling/disabling them as 
needed. I would like your UI to be the default though. I think the an adanced 
tab will eventually do the trick. I plan to put as much of the UI ion one 
place as possible.

> Some notes on this narrated tour:
>
> 1) The Plone UI makes it look like you're installing Zope products, but
> that's not the case.  The CMF has a facility for taking an installed
> Zope product and wiring it into a local site.  I think that's what Zope
> 3 wants also for activation vs. installation (though if TTW packages
> work out, you might actually be installing packages?)

Right, I like the idea of "installing" tools/products.

> 2) IMO the most useful things to glean:
>
> a. A global action labelled "plone setup" that doesn't talk about
> software engineering terms.  It's the entry point to configuration and
> is always visible for site managers.  Makes it easy to document and train.

I agree. The challenging part here is to decide whether this simplified UI 
should still offer all functionality or provide a narrower scope. For 
example, do we want the simpler UI to be able to install different 
Authentication Utilities or should it only provide a UI for the default PAU 
and its plugins?

> b. The control panel is a series of items that talk about what they do,
> rather than what they are (tool, adapter, utility, whatever).  For the
> most part, these words don't appear in the UI.

Right, I liked that.

> c. It's pretty easy for package developers to plug into this via a
> configlet system (as shown in the Kupu part).

In Zope 3 this is even easier, since developers simply devlop views and add 
them to the correct menu. We could provide higher-level directives for this 
later as well.

Regards,
Stephan
-- 
Stephan Richter
CBU Physics & Chemistry (B.S.) / Tufts Physics (Ph.D. student)
Web2k - Web Software Design, Development and Training