[Zope-PTK] CMS comments

[Dieter Maurer]

I played this week end with the CVS version of CMF.

In general, it looks nice!

There are a few things, I would consider as errors or
weaknesses. I know, I should probably report them to the
tracker. But that is much more work for me ;-)


Errors:

 * the link color seems to vary arbitrary:

     In some cases, it is white (which is good in the
     action box with its dark background),
     but usually, no link spec seems to be in effect.
     I, then, get my default link color, which is dark
     blue. Such links are invisible.

     This may be a Netscape 4.7 effect, but I doubt it.

     Now, I know it for sure! It is a Netscape bug!
     When I change the font family in the Netscape
     'Fonts Preferences' from "Helvetica" to "Times",
     all links become white. When I change back to
     "Helvetica" all links take on the default colors.
     Time to switch to a different browser....

 * the default 'NewsItem' view does not contain the LeadIn.

 * Most redirects in 'Topic.py' create invalid URL's:
   query strings with unquoted spaces.

   This gives a really surprising error response,
   because already ZServer returns a '400 Bad Request'
   with minimal information: no error class, value, traceback.

 * 'Topic' uses the 'Folder' icon.

   The causes are many fold:

     * 'Topic' inherits from 'PortalFolder' which
       in turn inherits from 'Folder' and 'DynamicType'
       (in that order).
    
       As a consequence, 'Topic' gets the 'icon'
       defined in 'Folder' and not the one in 'DynamicType'
    
     * The type factory of 'Topic' lacked the icon definition
    
     * The icon was at the wrong place.     

 * 'Topic/subtopic_view' generates links to the subtopic
   that do not end in a skin. If they are clicked on,
   an 'index_html' is acquired. Of course, it has nothing
   to do with the subtopic.
   

Weaknesses:

 * the color scheme was unusable for me: dark font color on dark
   background in the top bar and the action box and the news box.

   May be a Netscape 4.7 problem that did not understand to
   make links white.

 * I was often surprised what folder a folder action operated on.
   All search, submits, publish actions lead to the 'Portal Folder'.

   I implemented an "ActionTitle" for folder actions similar to
   that for object actions.

   I did not find it easy to get at the folder the actions
   operate on. Sometimes, folder and object are identical
   (--> 'Topic'). This should be made easier.
   I currently use a Python script that determines the folder object
   via 'restrictedTraverse' from the action url.

 * The search form should support searches for subjects.
   They are so prominent that it should be possible to search for
   them.

 * The presentation of topics with subtopics is weak:

    The standard view of a topic presents the search results.
    This is adequate if the topic does not have subtopics.
    However, with subtopics, the default view should
    present an interactively explorable tree containing
    these subtopics, maybe in addition to all documents
    and just the new ones.
    
    Probably the following views are relevant:
    
     1. all documents matched by the topic's query (the current 'view')
    
     2. just the subtopics (the current 'subtopics')
    
     3. an explorable hierarchy with the subtopics and
        any new documents, not already delivered by a
        subtopic
    
     4. maybe, there should be a way to compute the
        result of a topic from its subtopics
        ('or' or 'and' come to mind).

 * The 'Above in Thread' display in discussions is ugly:

    The discussion ancestors of a discussion item
    are formated as a ':' separated list. This is unwieldy
    for deep discussions. 

 * The 'recent_news' view was unreadable.

   I have never seen such tiny characters on my screen before.

   This probably is a Netscape 4.7 problem. I searched for
   hours to find any problem in the generated page (and its
   style specification) - without success.

   Explicit 'font-size' specifications for the leaf classes
   finally made the text readable.


Despite the long list, I like the CMF.


Dieter