Re: Meeting in Linz

On Wednesday 04 November 2009 17:03:53 you wrote:
> bout these. Wordpress on the other hand has a really good interface.  
> Especially for blogging ZMS
Wordpress is not a real CMS, it is mainly a "blogging software".  ZMS is a 
CMS. But a lot of software solutions are calling them byself a "CMS".

But what is "blogging"? More and more users are i.e. using only their 
cellphones to send new posts to their blogs - often with especially designed 
(cellphone) software and the "web blog" is just publishing the posts. This 
means there is NO further web based GUI. Such things could be done by ZMS very 
easy.

(and btw: 
Most real ISPs are not even "happy" if the have to host "Wordpress" as it was 
very known for many over many really serious security bugs / holes over the 
time.)

> is still not good enough because it lacks the features out of the box  
> other systems like Wordpress provide.
Yes,
it is not easy to cook my eggs in my coffe machine - so i use a pot of water 
for it ;)

> On the other hand I'd love to have it all in one system so I don't  
> have to explain both to the client.
> 
> What I'm saying is that the ZMS interface isn't as intuitive as you  
> might think for SOME tasks.
Yes, cooking eggs could be quite difficult with ZMS...

> The sorting for example would be a lot easier with drag & drop,  
> especially for image galleries or long articles.
I hate Drag&Drop features in web applications as they usually lead to many 
technical problems on the client side (this may change in the future). If a 
user awaits Drag&Drop functionality and it won't work on a special platform 
many of them are unhappy and the hotline phone never will stop to ring...

But,
there could be small buttons to move (up/down) objects in the ZMS GUI (i.e. 
beside the copy/past icons) - i really miss that...

> We solved this in our own mondberge.com interface with some jQuery  
> magic, no big deal.
> 
> Perhaps the "lot of bad responses" gave you the wrong impression -  
> we're talking about
> 5 out of 100 people. Still, for specific tasks like a online magazine/ 
> community the ZMS
> interface could be better. 
This hardly depends from the magazine concept (and it's business concept). 

Especially for the website of a traditional newspaper ZMS could be the best 
solution overall, but the workflow concept allows much more then this. 

We use ZMS i.e. in Online Help for software customers or as the base for 
server admin panel GUIs - means publishing content.

- But yes, if someone planes to build and run a larger community solutions 
like Plone could be more preferrably as ZMS in the current. 

If developer time is not critical the same community applications are possible 
with ZMS too - but with more work.

- But yes, it would be nice to see here some improvements in the future 
versions - i.e. a more powerful and flexible User / Role management (out of 
the box). Handing more then a few users (i.e. several thousands) is not really 
comfortable with ZMS. 

Typical features (like user registration process / double opt in, a "user 
area" etc.) must be written byself. Many applications are using external SQL 
databases for this. On the other hand ZOPE / ZMS allows a wide range of user 
management backends - but it takes developer time.

Not at least:
Afaik the main target of the ZMS devels was to build a CMS for professional / 
enterprise use - for publishing and handling serious amounts of content.

> Look at our project www.mondberge.com - we  
> ended up in
> creating a new interface for managing articles, weblog posts and photo  
> galleries.
Yes,
but this could be done by plain ZOPE only too. 

Why putting ZMS in between? Most of the features i can see on that shots are 
not depending from ZMS. This only makes any sense if someone is using the 
original ZMS GUI in parallel, because the GUI is the most important part of 
ZMS - otherwise ZMS is not required. ZOPE byself is powerful enough to do such 
jobs... - ZMS is just a very intuitive user interface to ZOPE for special 
purposes (like your solution).

> I'll add some screenshots so you see what I'm talking about. I know  
> this isn't for everyone
> but I still dream of a better and easier way to improve the ZMS  
> interface (ie. wider, lighter).
What i can see on the screenshots is (very) nice, but that are no real 
"improvements" for ZMS in general (sorry) i.e. for all of our ZMS users - this 
is a "special solution" for a "special application" from my viewpoint...

I have no problem if someone will invest the time to write a completely new 
ZMS GUI (instead of writing his own ZOPE application) - but i can't really 
understand the reason behind. Further serious simplification of the ZMS GUI 
just seems possible for special applications - but not in general. If someone 
plans such a special application with ZMS this might be (very) useful.

May be it would be possible to write such GUI "additionals"as flexible 
installable modules (i.e. as a Drag&Drop module), but this might leads to new 
problems in the further update pathes for the ZMS admins. 

> The table based layout is not very "state of the art" and could use  
> some cleaning HTML/CSS
> and provider better options like better CSS class assignments so  
> everyone can customize
> the interface.
> 
Yes here,
- i still hope the ZMS UI will migrating to XHTML / CSS based layouts in the 
next. 

Im not shure why ZMS is still using so many table based layouts - may be for 
backward compatibility to older (or even some current) browsers? I assume it 
should be possible to rewrite the GUI clean CSS based. If i can help here pls 
let me know this.

- As a second point a reorganization / clean out of the template system would 
be very nice.

If someone want's to run different outputs (different layouts, media - choosen 
by URL/user etc.) there is still a lot of hasse to fiddle with which did not 
uses the usual power of ZOPE. F.i. to make it possible to run a webiste with 
different layouts - choosen by URL/path:
	http://somehost.org/layout1/
	http://somehost.org/layout2/
	http://somehost.org/mobile/
we did that, but it needs a lot of fiddeling with the templates.

Zope really allows much easier concepts here - i.e. by putting different 
layout (i.e. methods) sets in different folders and using ZOPEs powerful 
aquisition system. However, such aquisitions didn't work in the past...

I.e. Plone still allows different Template sets by using aquisition out of the 
box and i.e. each user is able to select his favorite template, but not as 
fexible as described here. ZMS could win some interesting points here.

A CMS by definition is a "Content Management System" - it allows managing 
content indepently (!) from the output media and media layout. A real CMS 
should be independent from a single medium (like the web). ZMS is a real CMS, 
but handling different layout sets is still to complex.


best regards,


Niels.



best regards,


Niels.

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  Niels Dettenbach
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