[Zope-PTK] what happened to the wizards?

Tres Seaver tseaver@digicool.com
Fri, 16 Feb 2001 17:41:17 -0500


Lucas Hofman wrote:
> 
> Jens Vagelpohl wrote:
> >
> > lucas,
> >
> > the wizards (and with it the need to import monolithic .zexp files) are
> > thankfully gone. what you see in your portal (and the dogbowl) is the new
> > system at work.
> >
> > i think the reasoning behind dropping people into the metadata screen
> > instead of the content edit screen is because the more metadata you provide
> > the easier it will be to search for your content item.
> >
> > jens
> >
> Jens,
> 
> This is -from a usability point of view- a step in the wrong direction.
> I see the point that the installation gets more robust, and I am very
> glad for that.
> 
> However, the wizard where there for a good reason: to guide the user
> through the creation of potentially complex content. The Wizard product
> provided some standard functionality in multi page form input so that
> the site builder could focus on the pages themselves. I made a few
> wizards in a community site based on PTK 0.7. This site now has to be
> ported to 1.0, and I wonder how to tackle this.
> 
> For most user of a site the distinction between metadata and content is
> irrelevant. In most sites the metadata tags used will be different for
> different types of content. The add and edit screens should reflect
> this.
> 
> I guess we will end up with dumping people in the edit screen of the
> particular content type. There they can enter both content and the
> relevant metadata tags. Or is there an easy way to 'retrofit' the Wizard
> product?

Actually, I believe that the existing Wizards product would still
work;  we are avoiding *requiring* people to have a dependency on
it.  If somebody would like to contribute a "filesystem" based Wizard
product (so that we could manage / distribute it using "normal" tools),
we could certainly bundle it into the product.

We have a future requirement for "navigation sequences" as a
UI paradigm (e.g., to organize "pathways" through a set of content).
Such a mechanism would make designing wizard-like constructors much
simpler.

Tres.
-- 
===============================================================
Tres Seaver                                tseaver@digicool.com
Digital Creations     "Zope Dealers"       http://www.zope.org