Dave wrote:
I could go either way on this, but Elias does have a good point.
I would say that I am of the same mindset. I don't really care that much which way we go, I am mostly concerned about picking what is truly best for users.
Allowing a tree hierarchy does make things more complex in the UI code and for the user. Look that the ugly category and bookmark management UIs (you really need a tree control to do them right). And I'm not even gonna mention the code that supports HierarchicalPersistentObject.
Well, I don't want to go into that too much, but IMO those problems are with the way it was implemented, not the fact that hierarchies are used. Those are also cases of doing hierarchies in a relational database, which the file management does not need.
At the end of the day I don't think that what changed in the file uploads UI really adds that much more complexity for users. As I said before, I think that most users are comfortable managing files in a hierarchy because that's how all file systems work today and so people are used to it. I think that adding the "buckets and entries" idea will add roughly the same complexity from a UI perspective.
I think hierarchies are important to expert users, but other users generally don't use them. Look at interfaces like iPhoto or iTunes or GMail, they all have flat hierarchy of collections -- 2 levels like Elias is suggesting.
I would agree that simply allowing users to create a single level of directories would most likely be enough to accomplish what we need. I would expect that most people wouldn't need to create multiple levels of directories, and even if they wanted to they could probably get away with a single level.
Also remember that the main reason this work was done is so that resource files (images/css/scripts) from our themes can be imported into a weblog as part of a theme. I double checked all of the existing themes and none of them use 2 levels of directories, so it should be okay if we only allow a single level of directories.
What I'd like to see in the file-uploads area is metadata, we should be able to save title, summary, category and tags for each uploaded file. If you want a hierarchy, view by category. If you want collections, view by tag.
ewww. to me that is a big leap, both in terms of UI complexity and software complexity. i would be very hesitant about doing that because IMO that borders on the kind of thing people should be doing in a different service.
my other hesitation here is usefulness. i can certainly see how capturing that metadata would be useful to some people who are power users, but my guess is that most people probably won't use it. i expect that 95%+ of the uploads in peoples weblogs now are just photos which they want to dump into an entry and will basically forget about within a week or so.
-- Allen
- Dave
