[Zope-dev] SVN: Zope/trunk/ Moved zope.formlib / zope.app.form integration into a separate package called five.formlib.

Sun Dec 27 20:32:35 EST 2009

Hanno Schlichting wrote:

> From my point of view most of the original UI building blocks of Zope
> 3 have failed to catch on. More modern systems like repoze.bfg prefer
> a much simpler model using ZPT macros or trying to mirror the CMF
> skins model. In the Plone world we adopted the CA to build and
> customize our UI and it has been a massive failure. I think the
> fundamental problem of these technologies is, that they have been
> built by developers for developers. We made it incredible hard for
> non-developers to do anything meaningful with our UI.

I'm not sure I'd agree completely with what you're saying. I think 
*viewlets* have been a problem in the way that they are used in Plone, 
i.e. as a general page composition mechanism. In hindsight, I wish we'd 
had maybe half a dozen viewlet providers at most, used only for things 
like status messages or extra <head /> content being plugged in by third 
party systems.

On balance, I think browser views have provided a huge benefit over what 
people were doing before, in that they provide a sane place to put 
"display logic". I know the separate ZCML registration step has been a 
hampering for some, but with grokcore.view/five.grok that's become 
easier. Customisation is still not as esay as it is with portal_skins, 
unless you're using z3c.jbot, in which case it's arguably easier.

I don't necessarily disagree with your diagnosis: too many of these 
things were written by developers for developers. It seems sometimes 
like the goal of a "pluggable" UI, where packages plug themselves into 
an overall structure, has been allowed to overshadow the goal of a 
"customiseable" UI, where integrators can easily customise the UI to 
their needs.

However, on balance, I think the move to Zope 3-style views, at least, 
has been positive. I'm in the intersting position right now of teaching 
"new" techniques to a team that has been on Plone 2.5 and done 
everything TTW for a long time. Some "new" things they reject as too 
obscure. But there are more "new" techniques that they see as a 
blessing, recognising many of the problems they had in the past.

Careful with the bathwater again... :-)

Martin

-- 
Author of `Professional Plone Development`, a book for developers who
want to work with Plone. See http://martinaspeli.net/plone-book