Re: Idea: Widgets and Panels
Dave wrote: On 3/9/07, Allen Gilliland [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: okay, here's an idea/proposal for how we could introduce widget functionality into Roller. Thanks Allen. That's good stuff. I think this would be a very good system for enabling custom widgets. I have no questions or complains at the moment. I agree with your characterization of a widget and the panels idea is right on. It looks quite a bit more flexible than the widget systems in Wordpress and MovableType. The UI will be interesting. We'll have to make it easy for a user to pick which panel to add a widget to and easy change ordering of widgets within a panel. Yes, the UI will definitely be one of the key elements and will take some work to get right, my next step is to begin designing that in more detail. One idea which I am throwing around in my mind is the idea of modularizing the UI a bit more than it is right now. What we have right now gets the job done, but I think that from a usability stand point our UI is a bit too cluttered and is more designed for engineers who don't mind having lots of options on the screen at one time. I think that non-tech users (our primary audience) don't like that and get confused by it, so in general I think it would be nice to break the UI up into more modules and to break some of our forms up into multiple forms. I'm not really planning to enact something like this for 4.0, but it's something that I may want to start on for all the weblog customization features that I'll be working on. To be specific, what I am currently thinking of doing would be to create a new module for 'Weblog Design' (basically a tab in our current UI) and place just the forms/actions which deal with blog design here. So that would include the 'Theme' and 'Templates' pages from the current pages, and any new pages we decide on for stylesheet overrides and the widgets panels stuff. This way all the things which are specifically related to designing how a weblog looks are organized together and the experience can be streamlined more easily. Anyways, just an idea I'm kicking around. -- Allen James and Elias: I thought you guys were working on a similar proposal. Do you have any comments on Allen's work here (see the link below)? - Dave On 3/9/07, Allen Gilliland [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I am calling this an idea right now because the proposal is deliberately left unfinished in many areas. The reason for that is because I felt it would be a waste of my time to try and design the entire experience up front when it's most likely we'll be discussing and changing our minds about things. So, right now I am operating under the general assumption that we all believe widgets would be a good addition to Roller in some form or another and we just need to figure how we want to do it. The proposal below lays out the general approach and what I think the major components would be, it doesn't go into details about exact changes to the data model, code, and UI, we can flush that stuff out once we are all agreed on the overall approach ... http://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/ROLLER/Proposal+Widgets+and+Panels Please have a quick read and offer some feedback here on the list. This is a big feature so active discussion would be good. -- Allen
Re: Idea: Widgets and Panels
Widgets are a new concept to me - but isn't the major use case that site A will offer up a snippet of HTML/JavaScript and user B will want to copy and paste that snippet into their blog? So I was thinking that allowing Bookmarks to be code snippets would solve that nice and easily. What use cases does your proposal solve? It seems suited to one in which blog hosts define a list of widgets and users get to choose from that limited set of widgets? Hen On 3/9/07, Allen Gilliland [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: okay, here's an idea/proposal for how we could introduce widget functionality into Roller. I am calling this an idea right now because the proposal is deliberately left unfinished in many areas. The reason for that is because I felt it would be a waste of my time to try and design the entire experience up front when it's most likely we'll be discussing and changing our minds about things. So, right now I am operating under the general assumption that we all believe widgets would be a good addition to Roller in some form or another and we just need to figure how we want to do it. The proposal below lays out the general approach and what I think the major components would be, it doesn't go into details about exact changes to the data model, code, and UI, we can flush that stuff out once we are all agreed on the overall approach ... http://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/ROLLER/Proposal+Widgets+and+Panels Please have a quick read and offer some feedback here on the list. This is a big feature so active discussion would be good. -- Allen
Re: Idea: Widgets and Panels
On 3/9/07, Allen Gilliland [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: okay, here's an idea/proposal for how we could introduce widget functionality into Roller. Thanks Allen. That's good stuff. I think this would be a very good system for enabling custom widgets. I have no questions or complains at the moment. I agree with your characterization of a widget and the panels idea is right on. It looks quite a bit more flexible than the widget systems in Wordpress and MovableType. The UI will be interesting. We'll have to make it easy for a user to pick which panel to add a widget to and easy change ordering of widgets within a panel. James and Elias: I thought you guys were working on a similar proposal. Do you have any comments on Allen's work here (see the link below)? - Dave On 3/9/07, Allen Gilliland [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I am calling this an idea right now because the proposal is deliberately left unfinished in many areas. The reason for that is because I felt it would be a waste of my time to try and design the entire experience up front when it's most likely we'll be discussing and changing our minds about things. So, right now I am operating under the general assumption that we all believe widgets would be a good addition to Roller in some form or another and we just need to figure how we want to do it. The proposal below lays out the general approach and what I think the major components would be, it doesn't go into details about exact changes to the data model, code, and UI, we can flush that stuff out once we are all agreed on the overall approach ... http://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/ROLLER/Proposal+Widgets+and+Panels Please have a quick read and offer some feedback here on the list. This is a big feature so active discussion would be good. -- Allen
Re: Idea: Widgets and Panels
It's in progress. It was pushed back to work on a few higher priority items. - James Dave wrote: [snip] James and Elias: I thought you guys were working on a similar proposal. Do you have any comments on Allen's work here (see the link below)? - Dave
