Hanno Schlichting wrote:
From my point of view most of the original UI building blocks of Zope 3 have failed to catch on. More modern systems like repoze.bfg prefer a much simpler model using ZPT macros or trying to mirror the CMF skins model. In the Plone world we adopted the CA to build and customize our UI and it has been a massive failure. I think the fundamental problem of these technologies is, that they have been built by developers for developers. We made it incredible hard for non-developers to do anything meaningful with our UI.
I'm not sure I'd agree completely with what you're saying. I think *viewlets* have been a problem in the way that they are used in Plone, i.e. as a general page composition mechanism. In hindsight, I wish we'd had maybe half a dozen viewlet providers at most, used only for things like status messages or extra <head /> content being plugged in by third party systems. On balance, I think browser views have provided a huge benefit over what people were doing before, in that they provide a sane place to put "display logic". I know the separate ZCML registration step has been a hampering for some, but with grokcore.view/five.grok that's become easier. Customisation is still not as esay as it is with portal_skins, unless you're using z3c.jbot, in which case it's arguably easier. I don't necessarily disagree with your diagnosis: too many of these things were written by developers for developers. It seems sometimes like the goal of a "pluggable" UI, where packages plug themselves into an overall structure, has been allowed to overshadow the goal of a "customiseable" UI, where integrators can easily customise the UI to their needs. However, on balance, I think the move to Zope 3-style views, at least, has been positive. I'm in the intersting position right now of teaching "new" techniques to a team that has been on Plone 2.5 and done everything TTW for a long time. Some "new" things they reject as too obscure. But there are more "new" techniques that they see as a blessing, recognising many of the problems they had in the past. Careful with the bathwater again... :-) Martin -- Author of `Professional Plone Development`, a book for developers who want to work with Plone. See http://martinaspeli.net/plone-book