[Framework-Team] [Plone-UI] PLIP 12227: In-Plone Theme Editor

[Denys Mishunov]

Hi Martin,

On Tue, Mar 6, 2012 at 9:38 AM, Martin Aspeli <optilude+lists at gmail.com> wrote:

> I obviously believe this is a very important feature. It is not,
> though, something every end user of Plone will use: it's
> admin/integrator/designer/developer UI only.

Thank you for pushing this. I totally agree that this might be a
game-changer for the approachability of Plone among the front-end
developers. But even though I am excited about the visual editor for
Diazo, I am not comfortable with letting yet another tool "built by
developers for developer so that even developers don't like it" in. We
have plenty of those. If we spoil the tool and tell people — you
*just* need to hack around in order to understand how the thing works,
it will not do any good neither for Plone nor for Diazo. It's my
personal opinion.

The main points to me are (and these are just on the surface — I
didn't review the UI yet):
    - having a visual editor is great. I am all for that.
    - having visual editor that works weird, unexpected and gives
unpredictable results is worse than not having a visual editor at all.
And this part is not about prettier/more consistent with the content
management UI for sure. It's about proper UI and UX decisions.
    - the editor should be very well separated from the rest of the
Plone in order to not leak it's stuff to the public interface on the
running sites — this editor is something you use while developing.
Maybe some times, very rarely, when you need to tweak something. But
not more. So it has to be pretty well isolated from the public
interfaces.
    - if some features or UI elements/ideas are not ready for a
prime-time it's better to strip them out for the release than shipping
them raw and hope for a fix after the release.

Once again, I don't know how does the PLIP stand against these points.
The only thing I saw about the editor in action is the screencast. I
know that partially the UI flaws that might be here are because of the
UI team being inactive after you have asked for a review. Sorry for
this.

That being said, I will do my best to give my review of the PLIP from
UI perspective as soon as possible.

-- 
Best regards,
Denys Mishunov

http://mishunov.me • twitter:@mishunov