[Zope-CMF] Re: [Zope3-dev] Retaining ease of customisation

[Martin Aspeli]

> I'm just a tiny little bit confused here, what is a view and what is a
resource - in Zope2 and in Zope3 ? 
> 
> Maybe I just don't know enough about Zope3 (or 2), but to me what JM calls a
view is a resource, and vice
> versa... anyway, I think it's a good idea to have the conceptual discussion
now based on use cases, and
> here's my 2 cents. Hopefully someone can then explain what's what.
> 
> I'm playing around with Plone2.1 and CPSSkins at the moment. Plone has some
very nice new features like
> LinguaPlone and the new extended content_actions bar (the bar containing the
dropdown menus for
> workflow actions, cut/copy/paste, add content and manage translations etc.).

I agree that CPSSkins is a nice solution, and may well become more prevalent in
Plone, but as you've discovered, even this won't afford total flexibility in
defining exactly what you want.

What I'm worried about is this: People, myself included, come to Plone (probably
the same story for CPS etc.) and see that it does 80% of what they want. Then
they customise the CSS and that gets them to 90%. For the last 10%. They add
some templates, 95%, and then they realise that they'll have to change some of
Plone's markup in a way that isn't readily customisable. The thing that makes
Zope as a platform so attractive, is that they can very easily say,
"global_contentmenu.pt is where the menu is" (okay, so finding that is harder
than it should be, but once they know...) and they can override that bit of ZPT
in a new skin layer in portal_skins. They can do this very easily with
portal_skins/custom TTW.

A lot of people go with Plone initially based strongly on how easy it is to
customise and re-use elements of the UI. I really don't want to take that
incentive away from them. Yet, as I understand, if global_contentmenu.pt was
implemented as a View, they couldn't customise it TTW and it would be more
difficult (in fact, in my journey through the Five and some of the Z3
documentation, I've yet to discover how) to override this even if they were
prepared to set up a bunch of directories and XML files.

So, whilst CPSSkins probably is a long term better solution for many of the
original use cases, it's unlikely to form a core part of the Plone UI in the
near future, and indeed unlikely to be appropriate for every type of
application. In the interest of evolution, I'd like to find out how to make it
as easy as possible for people to override templates that are parts of views.
Unfortunately I'm still lost. :)

Martin