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

[Steve McMahon]

I know that every client is going to be different, but I'm going to be happy
so long as I know how to re-enable the add-menu availability of ATCT
Collections for the rare client that's really stuck on them. And, even that
could go with Plone 5.

It's going to be a rare user that won't instantly prefer the new
implementation.

On Tue, Jul 5, 2011 at 12:38 PM, Alec Mitchell <alecpm at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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> Framework-Team at lists.plone.org
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>
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