[Zope] ZDESIGN IDEAS = How to improve 'manage' ?

[Martijn Pieters]

On Mon, Jan 08, 2001 at 11:19:36AM -0500, Jason Cunliffe wrote:
> The need to improve the manage interface has grown urgently clear to me
> while using Zope myself, designing for all sorts of community and
> collaborative Zope-based projects, demos for a number of innocent
> bystanders, interested parties and potential clients.
> Zope 'manage' is plain primitive at present.
> 
> Considering the power of Zope, and the real workflow needs of people working
> with it, imho this present lack of thoughtful user interface makes no sense.
> By ignoring these basics, Zope is neglecting a #1 self-promotion
> opportunity - how it runs out of the box, and how quickly one can use it as
> site-planning/design tool.It is quite unproductive now compared to what it
> could/should be.
> 
> I am looking for real help here on how best to improve this...
> 
> Here is a list of features I believe should be default manage screen
> behavior now.
> Please submit your comments and improvements to these improvements:
> 
> KISS
> For those who do not want any added features, there should be an option in
> z2.py or as a manage_config DTML method in "/" or anywhere else in the tree
> to enable or disable 'advanced manage' features.
> 
> -----------------------------------------------------------
> 1. SORT TABLE
> 'manage' needs to presented with basic column listings so one can display
> sort by headings.
> 
> I am not sure if this turns into a CatalogAware Inferno or whether all this
> info is  already hidden in the ZODB and could be extracted adn cached
> sensibly and quickly. What do you think?
> 
> For example some headings I see a real need for:
> 
> NAME [default now], DATE[created, last modified] SIZE, TYPE[meta-type],
> USER[default=owner], DEPTH, COUNT, CHANGES, PROPERTY, DISPLAY

The created date is not available in the ZODB. Depth I rather not use; you
don't want to wake up a huge subtree (like the Zope.org Members folder)
when determining the depth of a tree.

There has been some discussion about using the 'title' attribute of HTML
tags to add additional mouse-over visible information to objects, I think
a lot of the information fields you describe may have a place in that
field (and not clutter up the view).

<SNIP>

> How easy hard is the above to do?
> Has it already bee done?
> What techniques/components exists already to make it happen?
> What need to be developed?
> How does this affect Zope core?
> What woudl you like to see when you click on manage?
> What would you lceints liek to see?

If you check out Zope 2.3 from CVS now, you'll see that a great many
changes have been made to the Zope Management Interface, included some of
the changes you listed, like sorting.

-- 
Martijn Pieters
| Software Engineer  mailto:mj@digicool.com
| Digital Creations  http://www.digicool.com/
| Creators of Zope   http://www.zope.org/
---------------------------------------------