[ZWeb] NZO / Plone / etc

[Sidnei da Silva]

On Tue, Feb 18, 2003 at 04:02:37PM +0000, Chris Withers wrote:
| Hi,
| 
| Have been resisting commenting on this for a long time but I can't really 
| keep my peace any more.
| 
| Having read Rob Page's announcement, I was a little happier:
| """
| This near-term implementation has both "stock-CMF" and Plone interfaces. 
| The NZO team will move forward with what works best and most reliably.
| """
| 
| But now I see Sidnei's comments:
| """
| Another thing: We are using a Plone-based site.
| """
| ...so what happened to the "stock-CMF" interface?

That line should've read 'We are using a Plone-based site for the pre-alpha'.

| While I empathise with Paul's comments:
| """
| For me, it's definitely
| put-up-or-shut-up time.
| """
| ...I have stayed "shut up" because I don't have time to contribute, but 
| since the only way I can currently contribute is to comment I feel I should:
| 
| My biggest concern with NZO is that Sidnei needed to make this comment:
| """
| I would like to hear only suggestions and no 'I hate Plone' emails
| """
| ...if there are are enough people sending mails like that to warrant the 
| comment being made, then maybe they have a point? At teh very least I 
| wouldn't it be prudent to keep the discussion open?

Theres is no one sending those emails apart from the well-known ones.

| I _am_concerned that the 'plone-ish' UI is being adopted both for zope.org 
| and Zope 3 when I haven't seen it functioning correctly on IE 5.0 (due to 
| its use of CSS2) and the fact that I find the UI unpalatable. Now, the 
| aesthetic issues of that (the waste of screen space, dodgy colours, weird 
| icons, etc) I'm prepared to ignore since those are personal preferences, 
| but there are a few bad UI issues that spring to mind:

Im working hardly to fix those issues while not breaking Plone
upgradeability. Im doing this by providing a ploneCustom.css file and
a image for the logo. As you may notice, NZO looks a lot different
from Plone right now, and its was not that hard to do that. Im just
overriding a few css styles. OTOH, It would mean a complete new skin
if we used the CMF.

| - CSS compatability. What are Zope.org's target browsers? What should they 
| be? I had problems with NZO on Mozilla 1.0 and I've had ciritical problems 
| with Plone on IE 5.0.

Depends on how much effort the community is willing to put into. I
know that theres a lot of people out there that know how to do
cross-browser CSS and could volunteer. Unfortunately Im not good at
anything but Python.

| - column heading click-to-sort not actually clicking to sort. Since it's 
| done with JS, it only sorts what's on the page, not the whole set as it 
| should.

I dont understand what you meant to say here.

| - No link highlighting. There are lots of links which are neither 
| highlighted by a different colour or by underlining.

That can be fixed. How would you like to see this? Just tell me what
you want and Ill do it.

| ...those are just three that spring to mind, if I sat and thought, I'm sure 
| I could find more.

And I dont see a single problem that cant be fixed with half the
effort it would take to do the same thing on stock-CMF. So, whats your point?

| Secondly, there's the problem if the Plone code. I evaluated Plone just 
| recently and while it initially seemed impressive, it seems to change a lot 
| of how the CMF works out of the box rather than add to it. I was also 
| pretty appalled at the quality of coding in a lot of the default templates 
| and file system code, even compared to the CMF, which is pretty apalling 
| itself. Also, the 'features' of form validation, navigation control and 
| easier type construction appeared extremely fragile and suprisingly 
| difficult to use and I wonder if you tried to customise the plone workflow 
| whether other things would similarly start to break.

I have done more than 8 sites using different workflows with Plone in
the last months. All of them work perfectly. In fact, the workflow
works better with Plone because you have only one Page Template/Python
Script to change transitions. OTOH, the CMF has one Page
Template/Python Script per transition which is a hell when you have
non-default workflows.

| Something the CMF got _right_ is that you can usually take as much or as 
| little of it as you like. With Plone, you either take it all or everything 
| breaks.
| Now, these are only my opinions, but I've been at this game for a while now 
| and so feel at least justified in airing them, although I'm not asking 
| anyone to listen to them.

Thats the point: Im willing to listen and Im willing to fix those
issues for NZO. But of course I will not be able to do everything
alone. Erik Lange and Gitte Wange wants to volunteer. Anybody else?

| Those are all I can fit into the time I've got to write this mail, and I'm 
| sorry they're not better fleshed out, but I'm just waving a flag from the 
| sidelines. I'm happy to put-up-and-shut-up but I'm hoping that doesn't 
| become shut-up-and-move-on and, likewise, doesn't negatively impact on the 
| plans to grow Zope by a factor of 10, which by my current count are over a 
| year overdue now anyway ;-)

Dont even tell me that :)

I would like to say again that NZO look-n-feel will only be as good as
*I* am able to do it if there are no volunteers. I feel comfortable on
targetting IE 5.5+ and Mozilla as browsers. NZO is looking acceptable
even in Opera right now. Anybody that doesnt wants to upgrade to at
least these versions of browsers is willing to take the risk of not
being able to see some sites and be vulnerable to security issues. 

[]'s
-- 
Sidnei da Silva (dreamcatcher) <sidnei@x3ng.com.br>
X3ng Web Technology <http://www.x3ng.com.br>
GNU/Linux user 257852
Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 (Sid) 2.4.18 ppc

A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is
not worth knowing.