On Mon, Jan 08, 2001 at 11:19:36AM -0500, Jason Cunliffe wrote:
The need to improve the manage interface has grown urgently clear to me while using Zope myself, designing for all sorts of community and collaborative Zope-based projects, demos for a number of innocent bystanders, interested parties and potential clients. Zope 'manage' is plain primitive at present.
Considering the power of Zope, and the real workflow needs of people working with it, imho this present lack of thoughtful user interface makes no sense. By ignoring these basics, Zope is neglecting a #1 self-promotion opportunity - how it runs out of the box, and how quickly one can use it as site-planning/design tool.It is quite unproductive now compared to what it could/should be.
I am looking for real help here on how best to improve this...
Here is a list of features I believe should be default manage screen behavior now. Please submit your comments and improvements to these improvements:
KISS For those who do not want any added features, there should be an option in z2.py or as a manage_config DTML method in "/" or anywhere else in the tree to enable or disable 'advanced manage' features.
----------------------------------------------------------- 1. SORT TABLE 'manage' needs to presented with basic column listings so one can display sort by headings.
I am not sure if this turns into a CatalogAware Inferno or whether all this info is already hidden in the ZODB and could be extracted adn cached sensibly and quickly. What do you think?
For example some headings I see a real need for:
NAME [default now], DATE[created, last modified] SIZE, TYPE[meta-type], USER[default=owner], DEPTH, COUNT, CHANGES, PROPERTY, DISPLAY
The created date is not available in the ZODB. Depth I rather not use; you don't want to wake up a huge subtree (like the Zope.org Members folder) when determining the depth of a tree. There has been some discussion about using the 'title' attribute of HTML tags to add additional mouse-over visible information to objects, I think a lot of the information fields you describe may have a place in that field (and not clutter up the view). <SNIP>
How easy hard is the above to do? Has it already bee done? What techniques/components exists already to make it happen? What need to be developed? How does this affect Zope core? What woudl you like to see when you click on manage? What would you lceints liek to see?
If you check out Zope 2.3 from CVS now, you'll see that a great many changes have been made to the Zope Management Interface, included some of the changes you listed, like sorting. -- Martijn Pieters | Software Engineer mailto:mj@digicool.com | Digital Creations http://www.digicool.com/ | Creators of Zope http://www.zope.org/ ---------------------------------------------