> > Am 07.10.2004 um 16:27 schrieb Geoff Deering: > > > I'll answer this when I have time, but I feel it's not flexible at all. > > There seems to be a very poorly implemented markup framework... I just > > saw > > some frustrated user wanting to pay for a reskinning on the Plone list > > this > > week. > > with respect, yes, there's a lot of crap that doesn't need to be in > there, but it's NOT that bad. at least you get what you want quite fast > if you know what you're doing. my company can do a full blown skin for > Plone within two days if just some example images are provided by a > designer who doesn't know css. > > the main problem is the lack of documentation and howtos. the templates > use a not very common language and don't follow a real coding guideline > and plone.css is big and bloated and noone really knows it apart from > about two or three people. we (i?) started the Plone UI Cookbook > (http://plone.org/development/teams/ui/p2uicookbook/) but we gave up on > that pretty soon because of several reasons which don't belong here, > however, there are still some examples of how you can do things well. > > oh and do you know a system apart from Plone that can do right to left > languages with just a few lines of css? i wouldn't call that "poorly" > implemented. suboptimal yes, i agree, it's one of the reasons i work on > something new which is partially inspired by Plones skin and skinning > process (hence the new thread on this topic). > > a few example sites, where you should look at /ploneCustom.css, thats > where the design is mostly happening, and not at the markup side: > http://mars.telascience.org/home > http://sasha.vincic.org/ > http://www.zetaweb.com/ (both versions, corp and dirty) > http://www.getupgetout.org/ > http://www.ugandastudies.org/ > http://www.netalleynetworks.com/ > > the frustrated users primarily try to change the design of Plone by > doing changes to the markup which often results in horrible outcomes, > or css newbies don't get it right. yes, a documentation problem. > > > I also feel the usability design is very poor in places. I don't > > know why there is such a lack of understanding of the basic software UI > > design guidelines happening in the web community. It astounds me at > > times. > > okay i can't follow you here? can you show me a web authoring ui that > you find usable? as far as i'm informed Alexander Limi does more or > less regular usability tests, and a british usability lab uses it for > clients and themselves. sure, it does have it's problems but what > hasn't? > > i agree that the skinning and development process is overall too heavy > and needs too much time but it needs no time to use it as a content > editor. i'd like to know which web ui you find usable, just to draw > comparisons. > > regards, michael
Thanks, I think that is a fair evaluation. I have only taken a quick look at plone and I found that one cannot easily take the CSS as in other sites, and change them. I spent a few days trying to customise a site and found I was creating more problems than solving them and just did not have the time to address the issues, that could have been solved more easily addressing the same framework where it was abstracted to just HTML and CSS. I think this is a problem that CMS designers and Web Application Designers are not addressing properly, there needs to be a sense of design framework in the HTML/CSS interface like that presented by CSS Zen Garden, where it is easy to make flexible redesigns, just working with the basic tools. What I tend to find is that somehow thing become very complicated and tangled together, and the abstraction of the design layers is lost. Consequently nearly all plone sites have the classic plone look, love it or hate it. I've built sites in Zope. There's a lot I like about it, but this part of it frustrates me. If just this aspect was more flexible, and it was very easy to deploy your own templates, I think Plone would be used a lot more in the design and CMS communities. USABILITY One of my major concerns with usability is the perceivability of form elements. It seems to me to be very important that form elements can be easily perceived, yet so many designers style them too far away from their native appearance, to the point in Plone, where buttons have the same style as fields. To a lot of users this is very confusing. It's not easy to identify native form elements. Many of these types of designs go against the basic design guidelines for software and I don't feel they comply with the upcoming core of WCAG2; perceivable, operable, understandable and robust http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/WD-WCAG20-20040730/#overview-design-principles But this type of disregard for these principles is becoming almost an epidemic. Widget and form elements should be clearly discernable from other aspects of the design. That' my thoughts on it anyway... probably get howled down.. Regards Geoff Deering ********************************************************* The CMS discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ *********************************************************
