Elias Torres wrote:
Allen Gilliland wrote:
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.
So what do you think? I'm all up for only showing one level deep only
for folders now (since it's just a matter of simplifying what we have)
and opening up to n-deep folders if we have users threatening us why we
didn't so in the first release in a future release. I'm for keeping the
same vocabulary (maybe same interfaces too) just not allowing nested
folders for now. I don't see how that can be so wrong when we had no
folders at all before.
To do this I am thinking that we can basically leave the FileManager the
way it is now, except that where methods currently accept a path we will
just modify the implementation to make sure that path is only ever a
single level deep.
On the UI I think I'll change the "create subdirectory" part to only be
shown when the person is at the root of their uploads, otherwise it
won't be there. That should provide the necessary functionality right?
So, I don't mind doing it, as long as everyone else agrees. Can I get a
show of hands?
I am +0
-- Allen
