On Jan 25, 2006, at 2:11 PM, Allen Gilliland wrote:
I'll take first stab.
This is a very big proposal so I think that some of these things
may be better off in their own proposals and with their own
discussions, so we aren't trying to talk about too many things at
once, but here goes.
Thanks and yes, I may have to break this up as it grows.
1. The proposal is centered very heavily around the idea to "Extend
Roller's built-in 'planet' community aggregator" and while I would
definitely like to see the planet stuff get more use I'm not sure
that we should be assuming that people want to use the planet
aggregator in their Roller install.
Good point.
In my opinion, the Planet Roller stuff is independent enough to
warrant its own project separate from Roller. Right now we don't
really have that because there is planet code scattered throughout
the Roller core codebase. I think we should investigate the idea
of managing the Planet stuff in a separate project that users can
"add" to Roller via a few integration steps if desired. Basically,
decoupling the Planet code.
I don't want to do this now, but I will adjust the proposal so that
it does not preclude us from splitting off a pure planet app in the
future.
That being said, my main point is just that I don't think we should
be designing the new front page assuming that most people want to
use the planet stuff. I think the front page should not contain
any idea about the planet stuff and can optionally be extended to
include planet features.
Another good point. I'll change the proposal so that the front page
does not rely directly on the planet tables or concepts.
2. Assuming we stick with jsps and tiles for the frontpage, I'm not
convinced that the new jsp tags you suggested are the best way to
go. Maybe I don't fully understand how things will work yet, but I
would prefer simple jstl for those functions rather than custom
tags. My problem with custom tags is that they are hard to extend/
modify for users who want to do so. Pure jsp code with jstl is
much easier to modify.
The tags just give us a way to reuse those components on different
JSP pages. I guess we could accomplish the same thing with Tiles.
1. The proposal doesn't include any mention about the idea that
someone would want to configure a single blog as the front page. I
believe there are a number of reasons to support this and I think
it should be part of this design plan.
2. I think we should also consider the idea of managing the front
page via velocity templates which *could* be edited via the admin
UI. It may turn out that this isn't the best way to go, but it's
worth considering.
I'd like to work these ideas into the proposal as well.
I'm starting to think that we should ditch the JSP front page
entirely. Why shouldn't the front page be just as easily customized
(via the Roller UI) as the blog pages themselves? There have been
several times that we've wanted to change the front-pages at runtime
and/or let an HTML/CSS designer work on the look-and-feel via the
Roller UI.
- Dave
