[Zope3-dev] DISCUSS: Consolidation of Zope 3 UI wiki pages

[Janko Hauser]

With the risk of being just a 'talker' instead of 'do-er', at least for
this sprint, I see this discussion as very important.

On Tue, 2002-11-12 at 21:22, Martijn Faassen wrote:
> Paul Everitt wrote:
> [snip]
> > I suppose this means that the do-ers need to get together.  I'm not  
> > sure who are the do-ers on the UI effort, and I'm not sure who is  
> > spearheading the effort.  I'm afraid we'll show up at your place and  
> > spend the first few days rehashing previous territory.
> 
> I have the exact same worry as you do, Paul; as it looks now there'll
> be some UI guys getting together rehashing how much of DHTML/stylesheets/
> mozilla/etc to use for Zope 3. This could easily become a 5 day
> philosophical session. That is not good.
> 
> I introduced the UI group because I think a good UI for Zope 3 is
> important. While Zope's ZMI has many limitations, it does provide for an
> easy entry into Zope and I think is responsible for a large part of it
> doing well with non-programmers.
> 
Perhaps the parallel announcement of the sprint and the
ContentManagementProjectsForZope3 mixed up to much, and many of the
people coming to the sprint think the result of the sprint is the basis
of the next Zope CMS. At least my thinking up to now was more focused on
the needed interface structure for a new CMS. The goals described at the
ZopeTop page are clearly focusing on the managment interface for the
ZODB. I hope that everybody understands, that I see these interfaces a
little apart. The former builds atop or parallel to the second.


> I had hoped someone would step up to lead this effort, but nobody did.
> Perhaps we should cancel it and move the people into some other project?
> 
I can only suggest to not give up this part, because an understandable
TTW view on Zope3 is very important to make many of the new concepts
already implemented into Zope3 less abstract. This will lower the
barrier for new developers.

> Anyway, I'm not going to take charge, as it's not my topic and I
> don't expect to have the time. But this is my opinion:
> 
>   * fancy stuff later. We'll assume none of us has enough knowledge of
>     fancy DHTML and Mozilla integration to actually make much progress
>     on it during the sprint, so we won't do it. Infrae's experience with
>     fancy client side stuff like Bitflux or Xopus is this is simply
>     not yet ready for production, anyway (at least not in any cross 
>     browser way).
> 
These things are needed for putting content into the system, not for
managing objects, services and programming logic. They are a part of
complex document objects, which are not discussed, defined or
implemented yet.

>     We can always add in fancy DHTML stuff later (we want to), but now we need 
>     concrete action. So we'll focus on plain old HTML + CSS keeping 
>     javascript supplementing in mind. People who want to discuss mozilla XUL 
>     anyway can go sit in another room. :)
> 
Right.

>   * We should focus on developing the core of a 'ZopeTop' or ZMI and for
>     the target audiences as described in the ZopeTop wiki page, with the
>     focus on SiteDevelopers and SiteManagers (and an 'underwater view'
>     for advanced content managers, perhaps).
> 
>   I think we can have two groups at the sprint:
> 
>     * Design and document the next generation ZMI. This is a documentation
>       effort (quite a bit of which may be science fiction) with a UI      
>       focus. What do the various roles want to do? Pick the minds of   
>       Jim and Steve and work out what the UI should look like, on   
>       paper and HTML mockups. Work together with the documentation group.
>       There's a ton of services, ways to hook up components, etc, 
>       and they need good UIs. UI requirements will most certainly 
>       inform the design of these services as well, I am convinced.
> 
>     * The style guide group. Ideally I as a programmer want to be able to
>       write dirt-simple HTML and have it look pretty in Zope 3, because of
>       the magic of CSS and the like. Possibly there will also be something
>       on a componentized GUI (what Shane has been talking about -- has
>       Shane written something detailed about this philosophy yet? we should
>       look it up if so).
> 
I would say, Shanes pagedesign ideas are part of the forementioned
document centric view of the content and I'm not sure it's needed at
this time yet (it's great by the way :-).

>       The style guide people will:
> 
>           * create HTML mockups and CSS stylesheets
> 
>           * Write down how we should be using various UI widgets;
>             a user interface guide like exists for Mac etc.
> 
Mentioning general GUI design, the term 'widget' comes into my mind. The
schema stuff is going into this direction, perhaps it would be a good
start to have something like widgets and an according style guide for
these widgets. Then build the different views from these widgets.

>           * Start modifying Zope 3 so it follows the style guide.    
>             This includes the existing page templates as well as the
>             current forms implementation.
> 
> Someone should step up to lead both groups. Both groups will have a
> strong overlap with especially the documentation effort. I think this is
> an important insight, myself. :)
> 
This is a huge task, and after all the bashing of the current Zope2 ZMI,
who want's to take this responsibilty :-) I would like to have a
discussion which starts with smaller bits so the different threads can
be more focused. For this, there should be some kind of consensus or
defined roadmap, so one could concetrate on the parts and not start to
reiterate all the general wisdom of UI-design on the web.

with regards,
__Janko