[Zope3-dev] Re: How does the rotterdam skin work?
Jean-Marc Orliaguet schrieb: Tonico Strasser wrote: Michael Jansen schrieb: Hi Is there anywhere an explanation how the rotterdam skin works. Some insight's to how an when which parts are selected? How to use and expand it? I think i'm making progress in understanding how the parts click together, but some additional insights would be nice. The tutorials i found about skins just told me to create a template.pt and a dialog_macros.pt and so on. But not why. And when either one is used. I think i understand some parts of that now and if there is no such thing like a explanation of this logics i would try to blame myself by writing down my findings so far. Btw. I think doc/skins/README.txt is a little bit out of date. I think the Rotterdam skin is doomed. I'd rather create my own skin than try to expand it. Tonico Hi! the problem is not in the skin itself, but in the model used to create skins. Filesystem-based skins that depend on ZPT macros are doomed by definition, unless they are designed to cover most of the site layouts you'll find on the internet (for instance the Plone skin is quite generic). But maintaining such a generic skin (HTML + CSS) is a lot of work. Yes, and the ZMI-design is also broken IMHO. Actions below tabs is not intuitive, the navtree does not feel good etc. I find the classic ZMI much better in this respect. I guess I'm confusing the ZMI with a Skin definition :) Memo: Management Interface != Skin = Skin != Management Interface Also there is a problem with the target audience: ZPT programmers are not always good graphic designers and UI/ graphic designers are not always good at ZPT / python. I agree. Tonico ___ Zope3-dev mailing list Zope3-dev@zope.org Unsub: http://mail.zope.org/mailman/options/zope3-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Zope3-dev] Re: How does the rotterdam skin work?
Jean-Marc Orliaguet wrote: Tonico Strasser wrote: Michael Jansen schrieb: Hi Is there anywhere an explanation how the rotterdam skin works. Some insight's to how an when which parts are selected? How to use and expand it? I think i'm making progress in understanding how the parts click together, but some additional insights would be nice. The tutorials i found about skins just told me to create a template.pt and a dialog_macros.pt and so on. But not why. And when either one is used. I think i understand some parts of that now and if there is no such thing like a explanation of this logics i would try to blame myself by writing down my findings so far. Btw. I think doc/skins/README.txt is a little bit out of date. I think the Rotterdam skin is doomed. I'd rather create my own skin than try to expand it. Tonico Hi! the problem is not in the skin itself, but in the model used to create skins. Filesystem-based skins that depend on ZPT macros are doomed by definition, unless they are designed to cover most of the site layouts you'll find on the internet (for instance the Plone skin is quite generic). But maintaining such a generic skin (HTML + CSS) is a lot of work. While I wouldn't put it *quite* so harshly, I agree. Also there is a problem with the target audience: ZPT programmers are not always good graphic designers and UI/ graphic designers are not always good at ZPT / python. ZPT isn't supposed to be grouped with Python. ZPT was definately designed for Web Designers -- people who use tools like Dreamwever. Except for the macro issue, ZPT has been pretty (as opposed to completely) sucessful in our experience. One thing I'd definately do differently if I could go back in time to when we invented ZPT is I would absolutely not include python expressions. In generally, I would have made them computationally less powerful. Our intent was definately that people would not do complex computations in ZPT but people have definately abused the power we've provided. I think the biggest problem with the ZPT macro approach to look and feel concerns are not separated. CPSSkins deals with this in it's own way. I'd like to see an approach for people not using CPSSkins. :) I think that this will involve some sort of post-publishing phase in the publication process. Jim -- Jim Fulton mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Python Powered! CTO (540) 361-1714http://www.python.org Zope Corporation http://www.zope.com http://www.zope.org ___ Zope3-dev mailing list Zope3-dev@zope.org Unsub: http://mail.zope.org/mailman/options/zope3-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Zope3-dev] Re: How does the rotterdam skin work?
Hi Thanx for the answers so far. OK. Just a question that occured to me after posting this. Is this the right newsgroup? I'm subscribed here for over a year. Just lurking, never posted before. So just forgot looking for a users list. I guess there is a zope3-users list? The tutorials i found about skins just told me to create a template.pt and a dialog_macros.pt and so on. But not why. And when either one is used. I think i understand some parts of that now and if there is no such thing like a explanation of this logics i would try to blame myself by writing down my findings so far. Btw. I think doc/skins/README.txt is a little bit out of date. I think the Rotterdam skin is doomed. I'd rather create my own skin than try to expand it. But i ( have to / should ) use the rotterdam skin as a blueprint for my new one? Or are there better alternatives? As i wrote the tutorials just mention the rotterdam skin! Has one of the books better documentation? Should i use the schooltools skin? I'm still willing to document my findings on how to create a zope3 skin. Michael Jansen - This mail sent through IMP: http://horde.org/imp/ ___ Zope3-dev mailing list Zope3-dev@zope.org Unsub: http://mail.zope.org/mailman/options/zope3-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Zope3-dev] Re: How does the rotterdam skin work?
Paul Winkler wrote: Hi Jim, just de-lurking for a moment: On 10/24/05, Jim Fulton [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I think the biggest problem with the ZPT macro approach to look and feel concerns are not separated. CPSSkins deals with this in it's own way. I couldn't quite parse that. What is not separated from what? Sorry, I assumed too much context. At a minimum, the concerns of the page author are not separated from the concerns of the site designer. Put another way, the concerns of the person creating the content well are mixed up with the concerns of people creating the O-wrap. There are probably other concerns that should be separated too. Jim -- Jim Fulton mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Python Powered! CTO (540) 361-1714http://www.python.org Zope Corporation http://www.zope.com http://www.zope.org ___ Zope3-dev mailing list Zope3-dev@zope.org Unsub: http://mail.zope.org/mailman/options/zope3-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Zope3-dev] Re: How does the rotterdam skin work?
Jim Fulton wrote: Jean-Marc Orliaguet wrote: Hi! the problem is not in the skin itself, but in the model used to create skins. Filesystem-based skins that depend on ZPT macros are doomed by definition, unless they are designed to cover most of the site layouts you'll find on the internet (for instance the Plone skin is quite generic). But maintaining such a generic skin (HTML + CSS) is a lot of work. While I wouldn't put it *quite* so harshly, I agree. Also there is a problem with the target audience: ZPT programmers are not always good graphic designers and UI/ graphic designers are not always good at ZPT / python. ZPT isn't supposed to be grouped with Python. ZPT was definately designed for Web Designers -- people who use tools like Dreamwever. Except for the macro issue, ZPT has been pretty (as opposed to completely) sucessful in our experience. One thing I'd definately do differently if I could go back in time to when we invented ZPT is I would absolutely not include python expressions. In generally, I would have made them computationally less powerful. Our intent was definately that people would not do complex computations in ZPT but people have definately abused the power we've provided. I think the biggest problem with the ZPT macro approach to look and feel concerns are not separated. CPSSkins deals with this in it's own way. I'd like to see an approach for people not using CPSSkins. :) I think that this will involve some sort of post-publishing phase in the publication process. Jim Sure, the separation between content and presentation is very clean in ZPT (assuming python: expressions did not exist..:-) ). The difference in the two approaches are more deeply grounded I think: - the page template model starts from the idea of individual web pages (easy to understand for a web designer) that expands into a whole site by creating abstractions such as 'page headers', 'slots', etc.. The starting point is a web *page* which becomes a generic 'template', and eventually a site as a collection of published objects that use the same templates. The process is from the particular to the general, the 'template' make it possible to do the transition. - with cpsskins, the process goes the other way: from general to particular. The difficulty lies instead in creating particular pages that do not follow any given pattern. The logic is close to the development of an application UI that tries to emulate web sites. /JM ___ Zope3-dev mailing list Zope3-dev@zope.org Unsub: http://mail.zope.org/mailman/options/zope3-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Zope3-dev] Re: How does the rotterdam skin work?
Jim Fulton wrote: Paul Winkler wrote: Hi Jim, just de-lurking for a moment: On 10/24/05, Jim Fulton [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I think the biggest problem with the ZPT macro approach to look and feel concerns are not separated. CPSSkins deals with this in it's own way. I couldn't quite parse that. What is not separated from what? Sorry, I assumed too much context. At a minimum, the concerns of the page author are not separated from the concerns of the site designer. Put another way, the concerns of the person creating the content well are mixed up with the concerns of people creating the O-wrap. There are probably other concerns that should be separated too. Jim To put it differently: with page templates you try to separate concerns, by splitting things into: content, presentation, portlets, viewlets, macros, local variations in the presentation (put your concept here) using the TAL language. But what you start from is in fact a HTML page. In cpsskins you start from the individual concepts (portlets, widgets, styles, slots, pages, themes, perspectives. ...) that can be related in different ways and the job of the rendering engine is create a particular composition based on the instructions given by different categories of users (UI designers. site designer, application designers, users, .. ) /JM ___ Zope3-dev mailing list Zope3-dev@zope.org Unsub: http://mail.zope.org/mailman/options/zope3-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
