[Grok-dev] Re: Organizing the further development effort

[Martijn Faassen]

Hey Uli,

Uli Fouquet wrote:
[snip]
> My project's primary aim is to implement an improved admin-UI for grok
> as well as improving the documentation. My mentor is Philipp von
> Weitershausen. It is of course an honour for me to work with Philipp.

New documentation will always be welcome and from what I read you're 
well prepared to write some. I personally hope we can keep your project 
somewhat focused though surrounding the admin UI.

As part of this though, I'd like to see an effort towards exposing 
documentation that's already there. There is a lot of documentation 
available in a Zope 3 system: interface documentation and doctests. If 
we could get that integrated in a nice way into the admin UI (using 
apidoc infrastructure hopefully), we'd make great progress. Hopefully 
with a little bit of extra work we can provide an export to website 
facility to get that documentation exported for the website.

> Please allow me to give you a short overview of what is planned from my
> side. Comments, corrections and hints are very welcome.
> 
> Concerning the admin-UI:
> ------------------------
> 
>  * Features to implement (must):
> 
>     + Nice(er) looking GUI (the HTML/CSS stuff)

Very important for marketing reasons and also usability reasons. This 
will one of the first things people see when they start using Grok, and 
if this looks cool, that will keep them interested.

>     + Possibility to manage application objects:
> 
>       - Add application objects (already possible, maybe some more
>         information about the possible applications in advance?)

Definitely more information available would be great. Also access to 
configuration information, perhaps.

>       - Remove application objects (even in case of 'broken objects'?)
> 
>       - Rename application objects
> 
>       - Introspection of application objects
> 
>     + Management of applications'/components' contents:
> 
>       - Possibility to "traverse"/browse contained objects
> 
>       - Display contained objects
> 
>       - Remove contained objects
> 
>       - Introspection of contained objects (depending on type/interface)
> 
>     + Interface for general tasks:
> 
>       - Start/stop/restart zope3 instance
> 
>       - Debugging information (trace-backs, etc.)


I'd also add:

* introspect schema of objects

* edit objects according to schema in simple forms. (not for real 
editing purposes, just debugging and experimentation)

> The list of topics to cover in the tutorial unfortunately might become
> endless. Here some restrictions might apply. From what I learned lately
> on public grok-sessions with the local Zope user group, people are eager
> to work with forms (formlib) and always try first to implement a nice
> "framework" for their applications, say: they want breadcrumbs, logos
> and navigational elements. Some even first ask for AJAX-support ;-)
> Though IMHO these are not (at least currently) core elements of grok,
> the tutorial might cover such things as well more in-depth. 

Definitely there is a lot more ground to cover. I wrote an outline for 
the tutorial that you may find interesting:

http://svn.zope.org/grok/trunk/doc/tutorial_outline.txt?rev=73519&view=auto

It can definitely be extended.

Grok actually has some AJAX support with the JSON views. :)

[snip]
> I hope this was not too off-topic, but Martijn told us students to make
> noise. So, ehm, here you got some ;-)

Thanks, good! :)

Regards,

Martijn