[Framework-Team] Feedback on New Collections for Plone 4.2

Alec Mitchell alecpm at gmail.com
Tue Jul 5 19:38:58 UTC 2011


Hello all,

The framework team on the cusp of approving an exciting new
Collections implementation for Plone 4.2 and would like to get a
little feedback on how the migration process should work.  In
particular, we would like some advice from people who have extensive
user training and support experience.

The add-on provides a new Collection type which is intended to replace
the current Collection implementation from ATContentTypes  It does not
provide a migration path from old Collections to the new ones.  Custom
templates designed for the ATCT Collection type will probably need to
be modified to work with the new collection type.  Additionally, the
user interface for managing collections has been completely overhauled
(entirely for the better).  For newly installed sites, the ATCT
Collection type will probably be removed from the Add Menu and only
the new Collection type will be addable, to avoid user confusion.
However, there's some concern about what to do when migrating existing
sites.

There may be many existing sites which depend heavily on use of the
ATCT Collections.  These sites may have invested time and money in
training to use ATCT Collections (in part because ATCT Collections are
amazingly unintuitive).  These sites may have developed custom
templates for their ATCT Collections.  We want to make sure that the
migration process is relatively painless and unsurprising for those
sites.

Do you, as people with extensive support and training experience, feel
that it would be acceptable to disable adding of AT collections in
favor of the new more usable collections during migration?  Is it
likely that a significant number of deployments would be negatively
impacted by such a switch?  If the old type were disabled, would clear
documentation describing how to re-enable adding it be a sufficient
mitigation?  Would it be preferable to keep the old Collection type in
the add menu, but change the title to one which makes it clear that it
is no longer recommended (e.g. "Old-Style Collections")?

We would like to balance the need to provide a consistent environment
for both new users and those migrating from an older version with the
desire to make the migration both painless and straightforward.  Any
feedback or suggestions you can provide would be welcome.

Thanks,
Alec Mitchell
Plone 4.2 Framework Team


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