Hanno Schlichting wrote: > From my point of view most of the original UI building blocks of Zope > 3 have failed to catch on. More modern systems like repoze.bfg prefer > a much simpler model using ZPT macros or trying to mirror the CMF > skins model. In the Plone world we adopted the CA to build and > customize our UI and it has been a massive failure. I think the > fundamental problem of these technologies is, that they have been > built by developers for developers. We made it incredible hard for > non-developers to do anything meaningful with our UI.
I'm not sure I'd agree completely with what you're saying. I think *viewlets* have been a problem in the way that they are used in Plone, i.e. as a general page composition mechanism. In hindsight, I wish we'd had maybe half a dozen viewlet providers at most, used only for things like status messages or extra <head /> content being plugged in by third party systems. On balance, I think browser views have provided a huge benefit over what people were doing before, in that they provide a sane place to put "display logic". I know the separate ZCML registration step has been a hampering for some, but with grokcore.view/five.grok that's become easier. Customisation is still not as esay as it is with portal_skins, unless you're using z3c.jbot, in which case it's arguably easier. I don't necessarily disagree with your diagnosis: too many of these things were written by developers for developers. It seems sometimes like the goal of a "pluggable" UI, where packages plug themselves into an overall structure, has been allowed to overshadow the goal of a "customiseable" UI, where integrators can easily customise the UI to their needs. However, on balance, I think the move to Zope 3-style views, at least, has been positive. I'm in the intersting position right now of teaching "new" techniques to a team that has been on Plone 2.5 and done everything TTW for a long time. Some "new" things they reject as too obscure. But there are more "new" techniques that they see as a blessing, recognising many of the problems they had in the past. Careful with the bathwater again... :-) Martin -- Author of `Professional Plone Development`, a book for developers who want to work with Plone. See http://martinaspeli.net/plone-book _______________________________________________ Zope-Dev maillist - Zope-Dev@zope.org https://mail.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-dev ** No cross posts or HTML encoding! ** (Related lists - https://mail.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-announce https://mail.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope )