Re: VIDEO: Simplifying Plone with tiles and shortcodes

On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 7:47 PM, Dylan Jay <djay-n0pU0XVUApFWk0Htik3J/[email protected]> wrote:
> 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.

I believe that the folder metaphor itself matters to many or most (new
or existing) end-users, quite a bit.

Pushing that metaphor away as a anachronistic skeuomorphism might make
sense when you are only managing pages or pieces thereof, but I
suspect that many developers, integrators, and users leverage Plone
for more than just that narrow WCMS context.

For intranet/extranet, or structured content management, the folder
metaphor is a useful organizing principle (e.g. users need a
container, but it doesn't itself need a page, or if it has a
front-page, it is incidental, not central to its function).

> 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.

I worry that pushes configuration-over-convention on end-users for two
common use-cases.  If pages and folders have shared implementation,
pushing that commonality up to users is a leaky abstraction when they
want a folder to come out of the gates showing listings, having a
distinct icon, being queryable by type in a collection or search.

My $0.02 is that folder (regardless of what implements) needs to be
listed in the add-new menu.  OTOH, maybe the core problem is a lack of
per-instance, user-exposed subtyping OOTB that makes it impossible to
re-think content types and what shows up in the add menu [1].

> 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.

I am not sure these need to be mutually exclusive?

Sean


[1] I really wish for choices in the add-menu to list more than just
content types / FTIs in the traditional sense. e.g. type + template
(subtypes configured/chosen/marked as per-instance behaviors, custom
icon chosen, default content, default tile/view/whatever).  And make
the vocabulary of choices a union of site-defaults and per-folder
templates users can configure themselves.  Having such things makes it
easier to say, "folder is just a special type of page" (etc).  Tiles
and shortcodes (being only views of, not proper subtyping) may not
necessarily be the ideal or sufficient subtyping mechanism, and might
mask the contstraints of the current content-type system.

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