Come kick some tires, at new.zope.org
Hi all, As some of you may know already, we've been hard at work building a new iteration of the Zope.org community website, one based on the CMF. This is an invitation to come and have a look at what we are doing for the new Zope.org server, and have a good kick at the tires. The idea is to get solid feedback from the community to iron out all the wrinkles and bugs that undoubtedly will be in there. You can find the server at: http://new.zope.org/ Please note however, that this is an early preview, and there are several known issues: - If you had a login on Zope.org about 2 months ago, chances are that you won't have to create a new account on new.zope.org; the LDAP database backing the site uses a 2-month old export. If you changed your password but not your email address during this time, the server can email you your password for the new server. If both changed, please email webmaster@zope.org for assistance. When we officially switch over, a new export will be created. - Because the current www.zope.org/dev.zope.org combination uses domain-wide cookies (.zope.org) and an incompatible session key, you cannot be logged into www.zope.org if you want to log into new.zope.org as well. Either delete the .zope.org cookie, use the 'Log out' link on www.zope.org, or use a different browser for each site. - Don't make any important changes or new content on new.zope.org and expect them to be retained. All changes to content on new.zope.org will be ignored the next time we migrate over content from the current site. Please file all bugs you find in the new.zope.org tracker at: http://dev.zope.org/Projects/nzot Thanks, and have fun! -- Martijn Pieters | Software Engineer mailto:mj@zope.com | Zope Corporation http://www.zope.com/ | Creators of Zope http://www.zope.org/ ---------------------------------------------
Hi! Please let somebody do some real web design for the site before it goes online. I am sure you'll even find people who'll do that for free. The current design is not competitive at all. Look at all the new CMF sites that are emerging in the community, like ZopeZen, MetaZope, or Zopera. They are all different in design, but IMHO much better than the current one for the new zope.org. I have heard things like "Zope might be cool, but can you also do NICE-LOOKING sites with it?" quite often, just because the old (and as it seems) new zope.org look so half-baked in design ... Having a good demo site for Zope is one of the most important things to improve Zope acceptance. So this should really be taken serious. We at EuroZope are currently preparing our new site's launch. We invited you to cooperate. But so far we haven't got a response. The offer is still valid! Our wiki is at: http://eza.iuveno-net.de. The design of the wiki itself sucks, I know. But that one is just a plain CMF page to start with. The REAL web design examples are linked from the wiki. Cheers Joachim
On Wed, Oct 10, 2001 at 11:06:42PM +0200, Joachim Werner wrote:
Please let somebody do some real web design for the site before it goes online. I am sure you'll even find people who'll do that for free. The current design is not competitive at all.
Look at all the new CMF sites that are emerging in the community, like ZopeZen, MetaZope, or Zopera. They are all different in design, but IMHO much better than the current one for the new zope.org.
I have heard things like "Zope might be cool, but can you also do NICE-LOOKING sites with it?" quite often, just because the old (and as it seems) new zope.org look so half-baked in design ...
The CMF skin system makes it easy enough to develop new skins around a running site. Our current focus is new.Zope.org running; there are only so many hours in a day! After new.zope.org has launched, we'll take submissions for skin proposals from you volunteers ;) Remember, Zope.org is a community web site! -- Martijn Pieters | Software Engineer mailto:mj@zope.com | Zope Corporation http://www.zope.com/ | Creators of Zope http://www.zope.org/ ---------------------------------------------
I'd be interested in proposed solutions rather then just pointing out criticisms; specifics such as Andy McKay pointed out , but include the solution to what the perceived problem is. I'm on your side, but we need more specifics to address your concerns. Andrew ----- Original Message ----- From: "Joachim Werner" <joe@iuveno-net.de> To: "Martijn Pieters" <mj@zope.com> Cc: <zope-web@zope.org>; <zope@zope.org> Sent: Wednesday, October 10, 2001 4:29 PM Subject: Re: [ZWeb] Re: [Zope] Come kick some tires, at new.zope.org
After new.zope.org has launched, we'll take submissions for skin proposals from you volunteers ;) Remember, Zope.org is a community web site!
I didn't say I wouldn't contribute. In the contrary ;-)
Joachim
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At 07:47 PM 10/10/2001 -0700, Andrew Sawyers wrote:
I'd be interested in proposed solutions rather then just pointing out criticisms; specifics such as Andy McKay pointed out , but include the solution to what the perceived problem is. I'm on your side, but we need more specifics to address your concerns.
Well, I think Joachim made it clear: Get a graphics designer and get a real design done! Look at the EuroZope.org proposal, that is what I call a site layout! (I did not choose the artist or was involved, so I am not bias.) Regards, Stephan -- Stephan Richter CBU - Physics and Chemistry Student Web2k - Web Design/Development & Technical Project Management
I am a person that is mostly technically and not visually oriented so I understand the "lets make it work and then we'll look how it looks" attitude very well. However this is a very dangerous approach. In theory it would work perfectly. In reality it seldom does. Very often (always ??) there is much more do do than we actually can and we have to start dropping things. What one drops depends on its priority. Which in itself does reflect our preferences. Since we are techies technicalities are top. Design goes down the pipe. The sad thing about it is that to sell something, even to us techies, its features are much less important than its "look and feel". If I take Zope's motto "Content management for half the price" and use the CMF-Dogbowl as a reference people will think "yes it shows". Nobody looks under the hood. Either its glossy or they keep on looking further. What I want to say with my epistle is this: Either visual design is of high priority from the very beginning or it will probably never be there.. Robert I am happy to help within my limited means .. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Stephan Richter" <srichter@cbu.edu> To: "Andrew Sawyers" <andrew@zope.com> Cc: <zope-web@zope.org>; <zope@zope.org> Sent: Thursday, October 11, 2001 1:58 AM Subject: Re: [ZWeb] Re: [Zope] Come kick some tires, at new.zope.org
At 07:47 PM 10/10/2001 -0700, Andrew Sawyers wrote:
I'd be interested in proposed solutions rather then just pointing out criticisms; specifics such as Andy McKay pointed out , but include the solution to what the perceived problem is. I'm on your side, but we need more specifics to address your concerns.
Well, I think Joachim made it clear: Get a graphics designer and get a real design done! Look at the EuroZope.org proposal, that is what I call a site layout! (I did not choose the artist or was involved, so I am not bias.)
Regards, Stephan
-- Stephan Richter CBU - Physics and Chemistry Student Web2k - Web Design/Development & Technical Project Management
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On Thu, Oct 11, 2001 at 10:59:44AM +0200, Robert Rottermann wrote:
The sad thing about it is that to sell something, even to us techies, its features are much less important than its "look and feel".
If I take Zope's motto "Content management for half the price" and use the CMF-Dogbowl as a reference people will think "yes it shows".
Nobody looks under the hood. Either its glossy or they keep on looking further.
What I want to say with my epistle is this: Either visual design is of high priority from the very beginning or it will probably never be there..
To quote Opus "I object, I object, By Golly, I object". I visit zope.org nearly every day to 1) look for new product announcements 2) as a portal to the "Zope Exits" 3) for documentation 4) to download products Anything that slows those down is a _bad_ idea; and lots of graphics will do nothing but slow those down. Now... If you were to propose a "Am I hot" section where people could submit zope based websites for peer review/rating, (preferably multi-axis, perhaps pretty, functional, novel, etc.) then I would have no objection. But please leave zope.org very plain jane. Now, some real feedback... The new search interface is much better. The less intrusive header is much better. Something is going wrong in search display, however.... Search on "session and manager". Note the second item "No title". Description is one long run-on mess. It is neither truncated to a reasonable length, nor is it properly formatted. Same with SiteTracker. And why did Core Session Product not satisfy the search? Are the Exits gone? Perhaps it is time. Jim Penny
+-------[ Jim Penny ]---------------------- | On Thu, Oct 11, 2001 at 10:59:44AM +0200, Robert Rottermann wrote: | | > What I want to say with my epistle is this: Either visual design is of high | > priority from the very beginning or it will probably never be there.. | | To quote Opus "I object, I object, By Golly, I object". [snip] | Anything that slows those down is a _bad_ idea; and lots of graphics | will do nothing but slow those down. Visual Design != lots of graphics. I think that as a showcase for CMF new.zope.org quite frankly sucks. I like the 'top' bar. That's it. I hate the corporate plain logo. The whole site looks disgusting under NN4. What's the deal with the 'View' box on the left hand side when you login? It's confusing, you expect to have other options there, when in fact the View button takes you home and distracts you from the items that appear in in the 2nd top bar. So there are too many navigation areas. Don't press 'View' in your 'My Stuff' area either, unless you want a complete dump of everything in there. In fact, don't press View when it's the only option in the box, you end up with weird stuff, or being sent to the home page. Just wandering around, I've got some nifty TALES Errors. Of course I can't get it to happen the 2nd time. Hrm, if Syndication is disabled, why is there a menu entry for it... you are in a maze of twisty little links leading nowhere... The two column display looks gumby too, but, I think I can get used to that. Although if you're going to have a 2 column display, and you're not going to allow user defined sorting, you should sort in strict id order, it's too hard to scan for what you want otherwise. The left hand menu display is inconsistent at times. Fixing some of this involves Visual Design, none of it requires graphics. Yes this stuff and more is in the tracker. (More functional stuff broken in the tracker though). -- Totally Holistic Enterprises Internet| | Andrew Milton The Internet (Aust) Pty Ltd | | ACN: 082 081 472 ABN: 83 082 081 472 | M:+61 416 022 411 | Carpe Daemon PO Box 837 Indooroopilly QLD 4068 |akm@theinternet.com.au|
There are people that insist every webpage should be viewable by text only browsers like lynx. And if its only speed that counts they might be right. However our job in the end is not programming and looking what is out there to help with this objective but to prosper in a competitive environment. And this means selling our services. And here we have to deal with people that know nothing and care less about most what us technically oriented people interests. They will eventually decide for the solution that gave them the best impression. What forms that impression has of course many facets. However it's about a zillion times easier to impress with a nice face than with a nice program structure. (And of course we want it to be fast and the right thing should pop up just half a second before we did reach for it ...) ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jim Penny" <jpenny@universal-fasteners.com> To: <zope@zope.org> Sent: Thursday, October 11, 2001 5:02 PM Subject: Re: [ZWeb] Re: [Zope] Come kick some tires, at new.zope.org
On Thu, Oct 11, 2001 at 10:59:44AM +0200, Robert Rottermann wrote:
The sad thing about it is that to sell something, even to us techies,
its
features are much less important than its "look and feel".
If I take Zope's motto "Content management for half the price" and use the CMF-Dogbowl as a reference people will think "yes it shows".
Nobody looks under the hood. Either its glossy or they keep on looking further.
What I want to say with my epistle is this: Either visual design is of high priority from the very beginning or it will probably never be there..
To quote Opus "I object, I object, By Golly, I object".
I visit zope.org nearly every day to
1) look for new product announcements 2) as a portal to the "Zope Exits" 3) for documentation 4) to download products
Anything that slows those down is a _bad_ idea; and lots of graphics will do nothing but slow those down.
Now... If you were to propose a "Am I hot" section where people could submit zope based websites for peer review/rating, (preferably multi-axis, perhaps pretty, functional, novel, etc.) then I would have no objection.
But please leave zope.org very plain jane.
Now, some real feedback...
The new search interface is much better. The less intrusive header is much better.
Something is going wrong in search display, however....
Search on "session and manager". Note the second item "No title". Description is one long run-on mess. It is neither truncated to a reasonable length, nor is it properly formatted. Same with SiteTracker. And why did Core Session Product not satisfy the search?
Are the Exits gone? Perhaps it is time.
Jim Penny
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On Thu, Oct 11, 2001 at 06:52:33PM +0200, Robert Rottermann wrote:
There are people that insist every webpage should be viewable by text only browsers like lynx.
Quite rightly. Though w3m is far better. ;-)
And here we have to deal with people that know nothing and care less about most what us technically oriented people interests. They will eventually decide for the solution that gave them the best impression. What forms that impression has of course many facets. However it's about a zillion times easier to impress with a nice face than with a nice program structure.
Which is why we should be sending those people to zope.com (the salesmanship site) or to a beauty contest site. Zope.org is a Developer site. I would not disagree at all that there ought to be beauty sites; including zope oriented beauty sites. (Which is why I proposed a "Am I Hot" series of links.) I certainly think it appropriate that zope.org have a disclaimer at the bottom of the page stating that: "This site is oriented towards making the experience as speedy and useful as possible for developers and daily users. To that end, it has a deliberatly stripped-down design. Our shameless commerce division is at http://www.zope.com. ____ and ____ are some examples of designer oriented zope sites." Jim Penny
(And of course we want it to be fast and the right thing should pop up just half a second before we did reach for it ...)
Hi!
Which is why we should be sending those people to zope.com (the salesmanship site) or to a beauty contest site. Zope.org is a Developer site. I would not disagree at all that there ought to be beauty sites; including zope oriented beauty sites. (Which is why I proposed a "Am I Hot" series of links.)
I certainly think it appropriate that zope.org have a disclaimer at the bottom of the page stating that: "This site is oriented towards making the experience as speedy and useful as possible for developers and daily users. To that end, it has a deliberatly stripped-down design. Our shameless commerce division is at http://www.zope.com. ____ and ____ are some examples of designer oriented zope sites."
This is the first time I hear the statement "Zope.org is a developer site". dev.zope.org is, for sure. But zope.org has always been THE zope site for everybody from suits seeking for Zope basic information (e.g. the case studies) to the more technically oriented. And even technically oriented people will appreciate good design. It's not only VISUAL design I am talking about, but also the design of the navigation (i.e. the information architecture), so that it becomes as easy as possible to find stuff. As somebody has pointed out, the design draft for EuroZope.org is no more than 30 KB in size, that's roughly the same as zope.org's front page has now. You can also use even less graphics, like in the nice examples of metazope and zopezen (if you don't count the icons there). With most people having rather fast connections and graphics being cached by the browser anyway, I can't accept having a simple site layout to be the most important design goal of a site of the importance of zope.org. BTW: If you want it fast and plain, use w3m or lynx, and all the graphics are gone (I guess you could still switch graphics off in IE, too)... Another point to make here: Redirecting the non-developers to zope.com is certainly no solution for ALL problems. To some extent, we (the other Zope services providers) compete with Zope Corporation or at least add services Zope Corp. does not offer. And while we all accept that Zope Corp. should get the main credits for Zope, we wouldn't want Zope to be identified with Zope Corporation ONLY. I think I am totally in synch with Zope Corp. here. They just cannot (right now) provide the full range of Zope-related services. Some of the other Zope businesses add Zope hosting to the portfolio, others offer services in Europe, Asia, South America, or Australia , where Zope Corporation is not locally available. So if we talk about Zope as a whole, there's no doubt that zope.org is the site. Last not least: As I pointed out a couple of weeks ago on ZopeZen or ZopeNewbies (I don't remember), the thing we should be heading at is a family of cross-syndicated Zope sites, so that everybody can choose their favourite editor and site design (so sombody could do a "no-graphics" Zope site, let's call it "ZLynx" or so), but the basic information (news, documentation, ...) is shared between the sites. This would be an even better showcase for Zope than just one zope.org site. Cheers Joachim
Well, it's better, but it still looks and feels clunky compared to, say: http://metazope.org/metazope Perhaps you could drop Alan an email and ask him to plish your design? cheers, Chris
new.zope.org No. It has too many different things. Different colours, different fonts (even different font colours). Stick to only a few colours and fonts otherwise it's difficult to see where the content is and where the navigation is. Who is responsible for this design? Does that person want us from the community to help? --- Chris Withers <chrisw@nipltd.com> wrote: > Well, it's better, but it still looks and feels
clunky compared to, say: http://metazope.org/metazope
Perhaps you could drop Alan an email and ask him to plish your design?
cheers,
Chris
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I just wondered. Is new.zope.org based on PageTemplates? You know if you say "yes", I'll only ask for a 'Show Source' button then though! :) Tone. -- Dr Tony McDonald, Assistant Director, FMCC, http://www.fmcc.org.uk/ The Medical School, Newcastle University Tel: +44 191 243 6140 A Zope list for UK HE/FE http://www.fmcc.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/zope
participants (10)
-
Andrew Kenneth Milton -
Andrew Sawyers -
Chris Withers -
Jim Penny -
Joachim Werner -
Martijn Pieters -
Peter Bengtsson -
Robert Rottermann -
Stephan Richter -
Tony McDonald