I tried validating the first two sites and they failed badly. Is that
a plone problem? Is it easy to control the generated xhtml/css? The
page was not a table-designed, which is nice.
Owen
On Oct 9, 2004, at 12:03 AM, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
From: Michael Zeltner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Fri, 8 Oct 2004 18:19:49 +0200
Subject: Re: [WSG CMS] Initial skin decisions (was Mambo and Web
Standards)
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
--
Michael Zeltner
Netalley Networks LLP
http://www.netalleynetworks.com/
*********************************************************
The CMS discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/
*********************************************************
