More info added to the widgets proposal ...
http://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/ROLLER/Proposal+Widgets+and+Panels
In particular I've added a couple sections about what new object and
data model changes we would make as well as a breakdown of 2 different
options we have for rendering.
check it out and lets hear some comments.
-- Allen
Allen Gilliland wrote:
Dave wrote:
On 3/9/07, Allen Gilliland <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
okay, here's an idea/proposal for how we could introduce widget
functionality into Roller.
Thanks Allen. That's good stuff.
I think this would be a very good system for enabling custom widgets.
I have no questions or complains at the moment. I agree with your
characterization of a widget and the panels idea is right on. It looks
quite a bit more flexible than the widget systems in Wordpress and
MovableType.
The UI will be interesting. We'll have to make it easy for a user to
pick which panel to add a widget to and easy change ordering of
widgets within a panel.
Yes, the UI will definitely be one of the key elements and will take
some work to get right, my next step is to begin designing that in more
detail.
One idea which I am throwing around in my mind is the idea of
modularizing the UI a bit more than it is right now. What we have right
now gets the job done, but I think that from a usability stand point our
UI is a bit too cluttered and is more designed for engineers who don't
mind having lots of options on the screen at one time. I think that
non-tech users (our primary audience) don't like that and get confused
by it, so in general I think it would be nice to break the UI up into
more modules and to break some of our forms up into multiple forms.
I'm not really planning to enact something like this for 4.0, but it's
something that I may want to start on for all the weblog customization
features that I'll be working on. To be specific, what I am currently
thinking of doing would be to create a new module for 'Weblog Design'
(basically a tab in our current UI) and place just the forms/actions
which deal with blog design here. So that would include the 'Theme' and
'Templates' pages from the current pages, and any new pages we decide on
for stylesheet overrides and the widgets & panels stuff. This way all
the things which are specifically related to designing how a weblog
looks are organized together and the experience can be streamlined more
easily.
Anyways, just an idea I'm kicking around.
-- Allen
James and Elias: I thought you guys were working on a similar
proposal. Do you have any comments on Allen's work here (see the link
below)?
- Dave
On 3/9/07, Allen Gilliland <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I am calling this an "idea" right now because the proposal is
deliberately left unfinished in many areas. The reason for that is
because I felt it would be a waste of my time to try and design the
entire experience up front when it's most likely we'll be discussing and
changing our minds about things.
So, right now I am operating under the general assumption that we all
believe widgets would be a good addition to Roller in some form or
another and we just need to figure how we want to do it. The proposal
below lays out the general approach and what I think the major
components would be, it doesn't go into details about exact changes to
the data model, code, and UI, we can flush that stuff out once we are
all agreed on the overall approach ...
http://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/ROLLER/Proposal+Widgets+and+Panels
Please have a quick read and offer some feedback here on the list. This
is a big feature so active discussion would be good.
-- Allen
