[Zope-CMF] CMF Usabiltiy

[John Morton]

On Fri, 12 Jul 2002 18:15, alan runyan wrote:

> * a 'tree structure manager'?  this is fairly simplistic I believe.

Don't we already have that via the ZMI?

> * using the IE5 WYSIWYG editor is very subjective.  I personally dont like
> it.  and highly recommend using JAVA WYSIWYG editors - they have a hope
> ofworking w/ Mac's.

Check out the ExternalEditor product, for editing textareas, or go webDAV for 
everything else.

> > An odd thing is that in Zope if you move stuff from folder to folder,
> > links that refer to it break while in a commercial CMS the links would
> > simply carry on working as all the items of content are in a database.
> > But how often is that a real problem?
>
> * this is actually something that should be addressed.  There are a few
> ways of doing this.  but it probably will require really ugly regex's ;(
> webchecker -- may be able to help.  but I dont see this as a huge problem
> if you can check the links in your website.

It's superficially straight forward:

  - Create a product called Redirect, or similar, that stores an URL  
  (probably relative to the site root) of the new location of the content,
  and impliments several layers of redirect - http, meta refresh, and finally
  a 'click here for the real content' page.

  - Hack the cut and paste code to automatically replace cut content with 
  a redirect object pointing to the new location. 

The fun is in the eligant handling of the corner cases and ZMI:

   - Folders are a bit more fiddly, in that you need to chop the bit off
   that's beyond the folder and append it to the new folder url. To have
   this redirection occur at all may require fiddling with the traversal
   machinery.

   - If you move a lot of content, you'll end up with a lot of redirect
   objects lying around. Filtering them out is a good idea, but it makes
   id clash exceptions a little confusing if they don't do something clever,
   like tell you that they clash with a redirect object, specifically. Fast
   toggling between seeing them and not would help, too.
   
   - chains of redirects will work, but if you delete one out of the middle  
   of the chain, you'll end up with broken redirects lying around that need
   cleaning up. 
 
   - Plenty more things that more clever people will be able to think up.

This isn't strictly a CMF thing, of course. I assume, though, that it's 
either hard, or there hasn't been much demard from zope.com customers
for it, or something like it would have been implemented by now.

John