"Andrew M. Kuchling" wrote:
We went live with some revisions to our Web site last Saturday, and some of them will be of interest to Zopeheads. The most significant new feature is a new version of the Sequence Builder, which is at:
http://www.mems-exchange.org/z/process/builder/
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Doing a Web-based user interface for this sort of thing is hard, and our UI is still clunky in various ways; suggestions for improvements are welcome. I don't know of any other sites that tackle anything this complicated, because this is harder than "I want X copies of book Y"; instead, you're assembling a recipe where order matters. If anyone knows of sites that do something similar, we'd love to hear about them; maybe we can borrow some UI ideas from them.
This sounds like it could be generalized into a workflow product. Many business processes have order sensitive sequences. A generic workflow product that could handle editorial workflow for a content site as well as manufacturing workflow such as this, would be a _very nice_ addition to the Zope arsenal. So you might want to look at existing workflow products to get your ui ideas. Allaire Spectra has some nice ideas WRT creating workflow objects(sequences), then creating 'jobs' (workflow object _instances_), and handing off the tasks in the sequence to the appropriate people. I believe that it can also designate automatic handling of certain tasks without human intervention. HTH, Michael.