[Zope-PTK] CMS comments
Tres Seaver
tseaver@digicool.com
Mon, 12 Mar 2001 21:15:08 -0500
Dieter Maurer wrote:
> 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....
NS 4.x *is* hard; I usually customize the 'Basic' skin's colors
first thing, and make that color something like 'DarkMagenta'
instead of 'LightGrey'. I'm specifically prohibited from changing
colors in the CVS checkout though, as I actually prefer the 'No CSS'
skin for many kinds of tasks. :)
> * the default 'NewsItem' view does not contain the LeadIn.
Hmm, true -- the "Leadin" is only used on the 'recent_news' page.
Check out Jeffrey's excellent post on skinning to fix that for
your site.
> * 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.
Thanks for reporting this -- the spaces were all in the
'portal_status_message' strings. I've just checked in a fix.
> * '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.
OK. This *really* should be in the tracker:
http://www.zope.org/Products/PTK/Tracker
but I see that the mailhost / SMTP server on zope.org is
balky, so you're off the hook here. (I'm not going to fix
this as we speak, though).
>
> * '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.
Another wannabe tracker issue -- I've fixed this by adding a
skinnable 'index_html' (uses the 'view' action from the types
tool, or the first one). Checked in.
> 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 am really hopeful that the PTK^H^H^CMF community will jump on this
and begin producing new skins, including at least some which are
"NS 4.x safe."
> * 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.
Can you post a sample of how you are using this script? I
don't doubt that the folder actions get confusing, but I am
not quite sure which behavior you refer to.
> * The search form should support searches for subjects.
> They are so prominent that it should be possible to search for
> them.
Yes, definitely so. The search UI needs an overhaul.
> * 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
The model is actually only "trickle down": subtopics acquire
criteria (optionally) from their parents. We have discussed doing
a "Pachenko"-style topic, where items would fall through any parent
which had one or more subtopics matching them; this requires more
help from the catalog than we can get right now without depending
heavily on the guts of its implementation (a la ZTopics).
> 4. maybe, there should be a way to compute the
> result of a topic from its subtopics
> ('or' or 'and' come to mind).
Again, we could do more along these lines if the catalog gave us
a supported way to manage result sets from individual index queries.
>
> * 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.
Can you suggest a replacement for the skin method which produces
this display? The existing method is in
'portal_skins/generic/discussion_reply_view'.
> * The 'recent_news' view was unreadable.
>
> I have never seen such tiny characters on my screen before.
I can't figure out why, either, but it is tiny in Mozilla, too
(at least there the font size adjustment works!)
> 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.
Again, I'm hoping the community can help here -- perhaps we
should start a contest for uploaded skins?
> Despite the long list, I like the CMF.
Thank you, especially for the detailed and constructive feedback!
Tres.
--
===============================================================
Tres Seaver tseaver@digicool.com
Digital Creations "Zope Dealers" http://www.zope.org