[Zope-CMF] CMF Thoughts & Ideas (long!)

[Adrian Madrid]

--- Jon Edwards <jon@pcgs.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:
> Hi all! First of all huge thanks to Digital
> Creations and the Zope/CMF
> community for creating such an excellent set of
> tools and such a friendly
> and helpful community!

Ditto. The CMF is giving me headaches simply because
I'm trying to acomplish things I don't have the zen
yet but I'm having the greatest time learning and
solving problems. Besides, the compliments on the work
already accomplished are worth any headache.
 
> ...
> a) Simplified the layout - took out all the divs and
> used plain tables (i
> found I was sometimes getting weird overlaps)

Ditto. On the plus side you can easily make every page
look exactly how you want it. On the minus side you
loose the ability of using other people's skins. In my
case, worth the trouble.
 
> b) Actions box - our sites will have many anonymous
> visitors, and only a
> handful of editors/contibutors, so I made the
> Actions Box a flat bar at the
> top of the page, which is only visible when you are
> logged in (editors
> bookmark the login screen so they can find it
> easily). This gives you more
> room on your screen, and is less confusing to casual
> visitors.


I am splittng the action box into two. The user+global
actions pretty much in the same place and
folder+workflow+object actions below the actual
object. And if you are the owner (or reviewer) I show
you the object id and status.

> ...
> d) WYSIWYG editor - used a Javascript WYSIWYG html
> editor for all textarea
> bits on the edit forms (our editors know little HTML
> and didnt want to learn
> Structured Text). I used this one -
> http://dhtml.yaourts.com/ - which is
> IE4+ only, but I think there are others compatible
> with Netscape. This
> includes dropdown boxes for styles and colours - in
> the future I'm hoping to
> link these to the stylesheets, so contributors can
> only pick styles and
> colours that match the overall look of the site.

That sounds interesting. I tried the URL but nothing
came up. Is it my connection or the URL was wrong? On
the other hand, HTML gives you greater layout
posibilities but doesn't it make it more complex for
the searching (ie. including HTML tags in
SearchableText)?

> e) Site Structure - errr... this is kinda complex!
> :-) I've hacked together
> a "CompositeContent" sorta structure, but using only
> DTML. Each "page" is a
> Portal Folder, with added properties.
> 
> (N.B it would great if you could add properties to
> Portal Documents, Images,
> NewsItems, etc, through the ZMI, as you can
> currently with Portal Folders.
> You can store your butchered objects in a folder in
> Skins, then just use the
> manage-addClone/manage_editProperties method to
> create new ones -
> quick-and-dirty way to create products for
> non-programmers! Alternatively,
> perhaps in the future you could do this through
> portal_types? ...create a
> new type, based on an existing one -which you can
> already do- and then add a
> few extra properties and give it a suitable
> meta-type name?)

I think this could REALLY jumpstart the creation of
CFM sites. I believe that many times this is the only
reason to come up with your own products: adding a few
special properties and create a new content type based
on an old type.
 
> The page properties tell it which stylesheet to use
> (so you can have diff
> colour schemes in diff parts of the site), which
> Layout to use (a layout is
> a "skeleton" page with empty cells where you can
> slot in content - you can
> have several different layouts per site), and which
> actual content-objects
> go in which cell (currently a "lines" property for
> each cell, so you can
> have several docs, images, and determine their
> order). Editors have a simple
> EditPage form with dropdown boxes to select Layout,
> stylesheet, content.
> 
> I have found 4 problems with this structure (which I
> think are also relevant
> to the earlier CompositeContent discussion thread on
> this list)...
> 
> - Do you just link to the original content-object,
> wherever it lives in the
> site (e.g. using getitem to pull it from the
> Member's folder into your
> page), or do you make a copy of it? If you just link
> to it, what happens if
> the original author changes it? Those changes will
> immediately show on your
> "page" without you getting a chance to review them!

With the current workflow you can't make any changes
until you retract your document. Then to republish it
you have to go through the whole process again. My
approach is to have a 'location' field with the
'portal/a/b/c' form and pull the articles through a
search in their respective folders.

> On the other hand, if
> you make a copy, you can hack it to suit your
> context, but any changes the
> original author makes won't be available, and you're
> duplicating all your
> content!

Yup. I think the previous approach is better.
 
> - You don't have fine-grained control over your
> layout. You can only apply
> general rules in your Layout object (such as "All
> images should be
> left-aligned", "All document titles should be blue
> and bold"), you can't
> customise the appearance of each content-object.

Yes, but the opposite can become too dificult for the
authors. You'd have to create a structure like
folder-document-page-paragraph with the overhead of
heavy logic and interface for each. I don't see how to
accomplish such task in one page without lots of
dhtml/javascript/whatyouhavenot.
 
> ...
> - How do you search? (This was mentioned in the
> CompositeContent discussion)
> You want a search to find only the content-objects
> which have been
> "published" to a page, and when you click on the
> result, you want it to show
> the whole page, not the content-object on its own!
> 
> I have the beginnings of a theory to solve this, but
> would welcome input
> from others...

I'm stil working on a composite object but my approach
so far is having a dublin container with normal
objects inside. The trick is to have SearchableText go
through the contained objects and retrieve the
apropiate text to search.

> ...
> Anyway, enough of my ramblings! I have lots more
> ideas if people found these
> useful, but don't want to bore you all if you've
> already thought of them!
> :-)
> 
> Apologies for the length of this message - two
> months of pent-up ideas
> spilling out!
> 
> Cheers, Jon

Thanks for your ideas and comments. I apreciate the
time and attitude of sharing your ideas. It helped me
to think about things I hadn't even thought about and
clarify my position on other issues.

Thanks again,




=====
---------------------------
Adrian Esteban Madrid
Benson Institute, Webmaster
Brigham Young University
---------------------------
adrian_esteban@madrid.com
===========================

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