Re: tiles/blocks

On 16/05/14 07:59, Dylan Jay wrote:
> On 25 Apr 2014, at 7:11 pm, Guido Stevens <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> On 04/24/2014 01:22 AM, Dylan Jay wrote:
>>>
>>
>> You're missing the key of my use case, which is: application space.
>
> by "space" I mean a place where a certain kind of user can do things.
> - a themer will on a diazo theme in the theme control panel. They
> might also work with portal_skins or portal_customerize etc. They
> might also use an editor and create browser view overrides.
>
> - an admin makes decisions about maintaining users, content rules,
> workflow etc so generally their space sitesetup, and perhaps top
> level sharing tabs.
>
> - an editor/contributor makes decisions about adding new pages,
> editing etc so their space is the plone content UI. add-new menu,
> /edit etc.

All of the above still assumes a statical system, a traditional CMS 
model. For me Plone is much more than a CMS, it's a great application 
delivery platform with an excellent CMS bundled out of the box.

> ie, What I'm trying to get out of you is who is creating the rules
> that a machine will obey? Or which combination of user roles will
> make these decisions?

I'm not trying to be flippant, but the answer really is application 
space (code space). The dominant user role is the developer, which turns 
the system from a passive content repository into a dynamic, active 
application that significantly modifies it's own behavior in response to 
user interactions and environmental cues.

The act of configuring and parametrizing that system behavior will show 
up in the UI as well, across all the 3 roles you mention I guess. But 
like an iceberg most of the logic will be under water, in code.

>> I want *the system* to make render-time decisions on both which
>> blocks/tiles to render and in which layout to do so.
>>
>> | As a developer
>> | I want to dynamically combine multiple information streams
>> | in order to render a context-sensitive personalized user interface.
>
> I think I might know what you are getting at, but it would certainly
> help if you gave concrete examples. For example: An admin fred wants
> to have some a home page whereby users that don't have permission to
> access certain tiles won't see them. And when they won't see them the
> page still looks good? So somehow the themer has to create a layout
> flexible enough to work with arbitrarily appearing and disappearing
> elements? I'm guessing you want more than this, but is this the kind
> of thing you are thinking of?

Yes, but indeed we want to move beyond just switching tiles on and off. 
We also want to rearrange tiles and even choose between rendering 
variants of tiles (big/small; newbie/expert). On top of that we'll 
probably have multiple "layout templates" into which we can stream the 
tiles, depending on the situation and/or configuration.

In terms of theming that means the focus moves from styling full pages, 
to styling a visual vocabulary of tiles that should easily mash together 
without the need to style every individual permutation.

I'm sorry but I cannot go into more details on our use cases yet. We're 
still working on them and we also need more lead time before we're ready 
to go public with the full scope of what we're doing. Plone is just a 
small fish in a big pond with a lot of well-capitalized competitors. We 
intend to present this at Ploneconf Bristol.

> It's something ... I'd expect only comes up when you have logged in
> users like in an intranet.

True, that's a core assumption I should make explicit. We are talking 
about logged in users, and we are talking about intranet contexts.

:*CU#
-- 
     Guido Stevens  |  +31.43.3618933  |  http://cosent.nl

     s o c i a l   k n o w l e d g e   t e c h n o l o g y


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