DevHome Future (was Re: [ZWeb] FYI: Back to the past)
Jeffrey P Shell
jeffrey@cuemedia.com
Thu, 20 Feb 2003 11:57:59 -0700
I'm especially interested in reigning in the Projects/Fishbowl area
into something truely usable. I've been trying to keep the Zope 2.6
and 2.7 project wikis up to date as I spot information that should go
in them, even though I'm not involved with the actual projects much, in
an effort to make the project area more trustworthy (ie - so people
curious about the status of Zope 2.6.xbx and when a final release is
due might actually find that information, if it exists at all;).
Are there any plans for revamping the Fishbowl? I'd like to see the
proposals page(s) move away from being a wiki. I think that Proposal
can be a specialized CMF Document, with the ability to comment (since a
proposal is also, essentially, a request for comments). They would
have a different workflow (ie "Technical Review State", "Awaiting
Resources State") similar to the ad-hoc wikibadges used now, but with
more meaning and (hopefully) greater enforcement. Proposals might have
extra meta/header data similar to PEP's (ie - expected zope version,
"replaces", etc). Local Roles or other permission settings can be used
to allow a degree of collaboration that the proposal's author is
comfortable with. I think this will yield a fishbowl that is easier to
keep clean, again giving it some degree of trust.
For proposals which are accepted and become a part of the Zope core, or
are other types of ongoing Zope related projects (like ZODB), we could
continue with the model we have now where a Project is essentially
given a Wiki, collector, or whatever the project leader is comfortable
with using for collaboration during the lifetime of the project. I
imagine many accepted proposals won't require becoming projects, and
that Projects will tend to be large-scale things to collaborate Zope
releases or site rebuilds :). Projects may even elect to maintain
their own proposals within the scope of that project.
Comments relating to the latest designs follow:
On Thursday, February 20, 2003, at 06:51 AM, Paul Everitt wrote:
>
> Howdy. Sidnei and I were on IRC a while today, going through some of
> the points brought up so far.
>
> Sidnei found the old home page we had done, which included a lot of
> the results from the IA (information architecture) discussion. He
> also found the search results page I had done, which had the Google
> look.
>
> Take another look at:
>
> http://dev.nzo.zope.org/
>
> First, be patient, as some things are quite broken. So for now,
> please don't mention the broken things. But some things to consider:
>
> 1) The multi-column layout that George mentioned.
>
> 2) Specifically, the time-sensitive, always-fresh stuff scrolling
> through on the right.
>
This column needs to stand out differently. Right now, the page is
really hard to read because there are a lot of boxes, and a lot of
black text on white (which generally, I like, but as of Feb 20 11:43 am
MST, my eyes just swirl around the page, unable to focus. Rules of
composition!).
The www.zope.ch page has nicer boundaries and is easier to read (even
though I don't understand the language). The difference is subtle, but
could end up being quite significant. (UPDATE: This seems to be due to
Plone's "editing box" that shows up around content when logged in. The
lines that it puts on the page around the content section seem to be
the worst offender of the page composition problems. When they're
gone, the columns look a *little* more natural. Better boundaries
still need to be put on the right hand side, and/or the really long
left-hand column needs to shed some weight.)
> 3) Under "Info for", our attempt to say to people, "If you are one of
> the following audiences, start here."
Good idea - I'd make the "New Users", "Product Developers", etc links
stand out a bit more, either by being bold and/or a bit larger. Or
more padding between the cells might be needed.
> 4) Do a search for "xml" or some other search term, you can see the
> search results. (Sidnei and I already discussed the need for
> extracting a "description" when there isn't one available.)
>
> 5) Perhaps most important, the navigation box has a hierarchy of
> "sections" that conform to the SiteOrganization page discussion:
>
> http://dev.nzo.zope.org/projects/nzo/SiteOrganization
>
> The idea: break the big content pile problem into smaller piles called
> sections, and get people to own and garden the sections.
>
> Not much is in the wiki, but we made a lot of progress on the mailing
> list and IRC appointments at the time.
The wiki won't be helpful (which only adds fuel to my grumpy arguments
;) if this information doesn't get fed back in.