Re: VIDEO: Simplifying Plone with tiles and shortcodes

On 22 Mar 2014, at 8:56 am, Sean Upton <[email protected]> wrote:

> On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 3:48 AM, Fred van Dijk
> <f.van.dijk-1kr/[email protected]> wrote:
> 
>> I'm not a UI expert, but if we could provide editors with more context and provide a default info pane in a portlet, the edit bar or float alongside the edit bar in Plone 5's plone.app.toolbar concept that signals a "You're on a default page for a folder now" but probably also other useful information, it could stop most novice editors from getting lost. Out of sight, out of mind.
> 
> ...
> 
> Or just take what we have now beyond status-box warnings in Plone 4,
> and force a choice (one more click) for the correct context when
> someone clicks Edit or Sharing actions.  Explicit choice >
> over-simplification > implicit magic.

> 
> IMHO, the idea that a CMS is just about editing pages or snippets of
> them seems narrowly focused on one OOTB use case for Plone, but folks
> using Plone a a collaboration (intranet/extranet) or semi-structured
> (heavily fielded) CMS likely want the folder metaphor to stay (even if
> pages are folderish too by default).  I'm also pretty sure my lead
> extranet users (even the power users) would think ill of the
> shortcodes and lack of collection as a distinct thing.

Folders aren't going away, they will just be the same thing as pages. or another way to think of it pages disappear and folders gain rich text. If you wanted it would be trivial to create a folder type based on page which had a folder listing tile already installed. Same for collections. Perhaps that can even be supported more easily using the layouts idea Martin mentioned.

I think it's really important not to discount things that work differently than how they work now. Instead we need to work through the specific use-cases to see what we might gain and what we might lose by things working differently. If we don't we may never improve. Not everyone might agree but I also think it's more important to put priority on new user experiences rather than existing user experiences. If Plone is to survive it needs to stay ahead of the competition and appeal to more people than it currently does. Our current growth stats don't look so good. We need to face that Plone might not be as easy to use as we think it is.

I spent some time going through various use-cases to try and work out where we would be better and worse off without default pages

https://docs.google.com/a/pretaweb.com/document/d/1jJ7765rW-CpdOhKR6o4hFaOzQk6xmuePFZd-zTzxwFE/edit

Please let me know what specific features your users need so I can incorporate that. 

In terms of improving the explicitness of default pages vs replacing them, I think in the end its still a concept that requires more training than other alternatives and will always be hurdle. If we can replace it with something better, we should. I think the tiles approach has many advantages not just as a replacement for default pages such as allowing multiple listings on one page, or the ability to embed forms into a page. But as Martin pointed out, tiles and folderish content can be considered separately. It just happens that IMO tiles also solve the default pages problem is powerful yet initiative way.

Note the proposal above already includes making sharing, titles and portlet management explicit with regard to applying to the page or folder level as this is needed when you get rid of default pages.

> 
> Sean
> 
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this first edition is now available. Download your free book today!
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