From: <sean.upton@uniontrib.com>
After playing around with Evan's ZMIBookmarks (which I like), I got to thinking about persisting (or semi-persisting) other user preferences for ZMI shortcuts. In some word processors, the font drop-down remembers the last few choices of fonts you selected and puts them at the top of the drop-down list. This is really nice if you have a bunch of fonts installed on your system. I think the same concept could apply to adding Zope products in the ZMI, provided you have a fairly decent number of products installed in Zope, you have to scroll every time you want to add something that doesn't begin with the letter A.
Have you looked at PatchKit? It contains a patch that allows you to "hide" products you don't use. It uses some browser cookies, and some data stored as an attribute of the Control_Panel (For global settings).
So, I'm thinking shortcuts at the top of the contents in the drop-down for adding an object to a container. It would be nice if there was a way to put the 3-5 most recently used products at the top of the list on a user-by-user basis, and persist those user preferences somehow (this really is a good thing, since, for example, DBAs might only need to add ZSQL Methods, Python Scripts, and DA objects).
I would be interested in creating something like this, but I'm interested in getting list feedback on:
1 - the best way to persist the user preferences, and
Cookie?
2 - How one would go about tracking what items were selected, since each product maintains its own add forms, and can't be relied upon to update a registry of said user preference...
modify the contents page of ObjectManger.
3 - the best way to approach the UI (I assume a monkey patch to the DTML for OFS.Folder's manage_main and a simple registry of preferences that can be used to populate the top of the list based upon the user's login)
This is actually objectmangers page, Folder has almost nothing to it. This looks a lot like an idea that would lend itself to PatchKit - And you could let it do a lot of the work of actually patching for you. Adrian... -- Adrian Hungate EMail: adrian@haqa.co.uk Web: http://www.haqa.co.uk