On Jun 11, 2004, at 12:01 PM, Pierre van Rooden wrote:
Rob Vermeulen wrote:I noticed that many people are thinking about making new MMBase wizards. The current implementation seems to be to difficult to use, unstable, not flexible, it needs a lot of resources, etc..
While I don't mind people thinking about better solutions, I would not just name something unstable or inflexible because you don't know how to use it optimally.
I find the wizrads are quite useful (I use them all the time), and can be used in many situations.
They do have a learning curve for those who create the xmls that is unwanted, would require a better error handler, are slow due to the xml processing, and I feel there is a need for a way to plug in your own events or handlers.
I am aware that it would be better to write new code than rewrite the old one, but I take offence at the way people like to bash the wizards without ever properly learnign how to use them. That is not a productive way of going about it.
Personally I think that if you want to improve the wizards, you might need to abandon the whole xml part of them, because it is that bit that slows things down and makes it hard to add new elements.
Otoh, I think it would be useful if we can maintain the look and feel (to avoid another learning curve for users, which is, in my experience, quite small for the wizards).
I also think one should at least concider a tool to convert old wizards to new ones (that is, if we choose a new format to define them, which seems to be the case here).
I second this view, i would like to see a new 'concept' for editors but as editors turn out to be complex things i would not see it as a replacement. If over time it does handle all the things the current wizards can do fine but if their use if limited or just different thats fine too.
My personal view of new editors would be :
all tools for creating the editors should be gui based even if the editors themselfs are defined in xml
all the resulting editors should be using our current output tools (the tags)
The logical result then would be a 'script' defined in xml that on changing create 'normal' taglib/mmbase pages. The result is fast editors that can/will be
build on 'known' tools (they are just tags) for most developers making it alot easer to extend and debug.
Now i really have no idea how far this will work and how tricky it will be but that was the reason to keep the normal editors until there is a clear winner.
Daniel.
