Re: do we need plone.app.customerize? was: [Plone-Users] Insufficient privileges on folder_contents

On 13 Dec 2013, at 12:07 am, Lennart Regebro <[email protected]> wrote:

> I agree it's important to have a TTW story for Plone.
> 
> You can today, without creating a Python module (or even use
> third-part modules) do loads of things:
> 
> 1. Create new content types with new schemas.
> 2. Import themes and modify them.
> 3. Change the workflows and permissions.
> 4. Set up "collections" that will update automatically.
> 5. Choose what information is shown on different pages by setting up
> portlets, including worklists.
> 6. Set up email notifications for various events.
> 7. And of course infinite amounts of minor configurations.
> 8. And I probably even forgot something.
> 
> This allows you a lot of TTW flexibility. The only thing of this you
> even need to go to the ZMI for is if you want to make new workflows. I
> have customers where I set up a demonstration server of Plone to see
> if they liked it. They did. A year later they wanted some changes, and
> it turned out they took that plain Plone demo site and started using
> it as a procurement management system. :-)

exactly. Wouldn't it be nice if that code was actually maintainable and used techniques that were the same as you use on the filesystem?

> 
> Now of course, there is another level of flexibility given when you
> can create new templates, and the next level of flexibility is when
> you can develop things in Python. And I do want a story to make that
> easy. But does it really have to be TTW to be easy? The only benefit I
> can see with TTW is that it allows me to fix urgent bugs in minutes
> instead of say, 15 minutes. I don't think the drawbacks are worth it.

For you yes. to someone who doesn't know buildout, eggs, IDEs, ZCML, GS, no. It's enough to make you use Wordpress. As even many in the Plone community do when they want a simple site. I want to grow the community. We can't do that by only pleasing those who already know Plone.

> 
> I think it's perfectly fine to draw a line between configuration and
> development, and say that configuration is TTW and development is not.
> I know there are a lot of people doing TTW development and saying that
> it is an absolute must, but I'm not 100% convinced that you haven't
> actually looked into the alternatives that are available.

Alternatives? Our company used to do eggs, jbot etc. All the current "best practice". Now we're completely eggless. We do sites where all customer specific code is done TTW. We don't have to restart servers to do deployments. We can run as many sites we want on a single zope instance without forcing Zope memory to go up or allowing different customers access to each others code. It gives us the ability for our customers to update and improve the code. We tried previously to get our customers setup with their own development environment and gave up. If we teach our customers how to develop sites then they might go to use Plone for the 2-3 other sites that they don't have budget to get done professionally. Some of those sites will eventually need professional work. We all win. Alternatively 
 if the only people that can develop Plone are professionals and the competition anyone can develop... we will eventually just fade away.

> 
> So are there alternatives to TTW? Well, how about a way to let you
> edit a jbot directory remotely, via WebDAV, as long as you are in

you can edit anything in portal_resources via webdav now. If we extent p.a.theming to include some form of templates then you'd also be able to use webdav.
If we get git integration going then you could develop locally in a directory and just git push to the production server.

> development mode. As just an idea. I'm sure there are other
> alternatives and somebody can come up with an even better way to do
> it. But I really don't think that Plones TTW story needs the feature
> of allowing us to edit templates through a browsers shitty built-in
> editor. That is not the actual feature people want when they talk
> about Plone and TTW. Neither is the feature they want the possibility
> to store Python code in the ZODB. That's not what gives you the added
> value.

The way it gives the added value is by not requiring anything to be installed, configured or any skeletons. You can develop on a cloud service, a AMI image, a VM or any other way you can have Plone running. That makes Plone incredibly accessible. People just want to customise their site as easily as they can. They less they have to learn or struggle with to get there the more popular the CMS will be. We've just done TTW badly in the past. We can fix that.

> 
> //Lennart


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