[Zope-PTK] DISCUSS: Creating news and the portal box

[Mike Pelletier]

On Thu, 13 Jan 2000, Paul Everitt wrote:

> First, do people think the way news is done Zope.org is the right
> rhythym?  Someone creates content, then creates a different piece of
> content that points to the content.

    I think this is the best way.  It would be nice to be able to mark any
object as 'Newsworthy', but really I don't think the results would be as
pleasing.  I wouldn't care to see Project X's entire Release Notes scroll
through my News page every time they release something, I just want a nice
short summary.  News content is different than regular content, so it
should stay in it's own object.

> Can these two steps be more productive and more seamless?

    We could offer to generate an automatic news item when you catalog an
object.  IMO, this should be a special news item which renders differently
in the list of news than typical ones do.  There would be no headline or
decoration, so it takes up very little vertical space.  It would only look
something like this:

January 13, 18:30: MikeP added a new Software Product, "Project X"

    That way automatic items don't take up a lot of space and are easilly
scanned over.

> 1) Should the three functions go in one box?
> 2) How can the functions be presented on screen that makes it distinct
> from other sites?
> 3) Is the idea of having one reserved part of the regular portal pages a
> valid one?

    I think we should make this very easy to customize.  It saves us
having to worry as much about stepping on toes if we can include two or
three alternative interfaces to these functions.  Say one like the present
memberbox, one done as a bar rather than a box, maybe even one in a
floating window.

    I have a problem with the memberbox at the moment.  I would like
objects to be able to dynamically add items to the menu.  The problem is
that the memberbox evaluates before the content.  If I want to pass things
to the memberbox, they have to be set up at the beginning of the
request.  This is hard.  I want to be able to do this...

<dtml-call "addPortalBoxItem('View comments', absolute_url() + '/comments')">

    ...and have the option show up in the PortalBox for this request.  To
do this, memberbox would have to be moved to the standard_html_footer.  Is
this possible?  I've seen you do some pretty clever things with CSS
placement, but I don't know whether it's safe to do so or not.

> 4) What other idioms could be expressed?  For instance, we've gone back
> and forth on having an Outlook-style box that had icons linked to
> "Documents", "Images", "News", "Links", etc.

    Zope Instant Messenger.  I tell you, this is going to be the next big
buzzword source!  And 'ZIM' is pretty cool.  ;-)

> 5) Should the switch into editing the contents of a page *also* include
> the rendered version of the page?

    I was considering that very thing yesterday.  It would be trivial to
at least try it for a while.

-- 
Mike Pelletier                          email: mike@digicool.com
Mild mannered software developer          icq: 7127228
by day, super villain by night.         phone: 519-884-2434