[Zope] Improving the folder view

[Alexander Staubo]

As my folders grow in size, I become increasingly annoyed and frustrated
with the folder object view's propensity towards disorganization. :-)
Is an improvement of this system planned? I have a few suggestions
myself.

- First of all, only icons are used to distinguish between types of
objects. Even GUIs that aspire to object-orientation do not make this
error; MacOS, Windows, KDE etc. all provide a separate column displaying
objects' types.

- Secondly, items are currently shown like so: "Id (Title)". As in:
"acl_users (User Folder)". As the list grows, this system becomes
exceedingly difficult to "read fast". Reading stuff fast is important as
the amount of stuff your brain has to sift through grows. If we can
assist the brain in being able to sort this data, we should do it. So we
should put the ID and title in separate columns.

- Finally there is the sorting. Zope currently sorts case-sensitively,
which means if you have "Article", "Documents", "acl_users", then that's
exactly the sort order you'd get. The logical sorting method would be
"acl_users", "Article", "Document". In most GUIs it is also common to --
at least as an option -- group directories together at the top. So if
Documents and acl_users were folders, the order would be "acl_users",
"Documents", "Article".

In case there is doubt in your minds about the practical effect of such
changes, I've prepared a demonstration, here::

  http://www.mop.no/~alex/soaptest/oldversion.html (this is how things
are done today)
  http://www.mop.no/~alex/soaptest/newversion.html (this is the proposed
reorg)

While we're at it, columns for "last modified" and "author" would be
nice, too. I envision a system where you would define columns and sort
settings in the control panel somehow. Of course, this raises the
question of whether such settings should be available on a per-user
basis or as one global setting that applies to all managers.

--
Alexander Staubo             http://www.mop.no/~alex/
"What the hell, he thought, you're only young once, and threw
himself out of the window. That would at least keep the element of
surprise on his side."
--Douglas Adams, _The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_