[ZDP] Portal congrates/comments

[Martijn Faassen]

Hi there,

First of all, very very impressive, this ZDP portal. And to think I 
started the ZDP project -- the far majority of all kudos and credits
and zen-points go to everybody else now, definitely!

There are of course some interface nits that can still be improved,
as I've seen others comment too.

For instance, I think perhaps you should limit the contributed stuff to
plaintext or structured text, and disable HTML. This would allow you to
liberally use < and > in text without having to quote it manually. Manually
adding &lt; and &gt; everywhere is a pain. [side point, I read on advogato
that Netscape for some bizarre reason also accepts 0x8B and 0x9B to delimit
HTML tags; these should then be filtered out as well, especially in the
light of recent security concerns.

Then there is probably a way to unclutter various areas. Take the
categories listing. Currently it looks like this:

     intro text                      topic

                                     topic
                                     
                                     topic

What you could do is simply place the intro text *above* the listing
with topics; people are looking for the listing with topic anyway, and
currently it's hard to find for my 'web eyes'.

Another point is that the top list of links (and the graphic of the mole, etc)
is currently too large. Users expect the relevant info directly, and
now I have to scroll down. That list of links could be significantly
flattened to take up 1/10th of the space. (also I'm not sure if you
need the 3 links there to zope.org, oswg.org and codecatalog.com..perhaps
you can put them somewhere else). The 'search' could be put to the side
as well (left side seems fine).

Besides these interface comments the underlying technology is quite
cool; it was easy to add a new FAQ and such (except for the quoting
business. It was a bit harder to add a topic; I wanted to add a 
link to the 'grokking OO' howto under Developers > OO Programming, but
ended up adding some description first, *then* a link, and it's all hard
to see and a bit too much work.

Anyway, great work! Perhaps I'll start adding some XMLWidgets documentation
on there..

Regards,

Martijn