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

[Martin Aspeli]

Hi,

On 8 March 2012 21:57, Denys Mishunov <denys.mishunov at gmail.com> wrote:

> Thanks for the answers. I like those "Good point" things :) I have attached PDF with 2 mockups — one for the configlet and the second one for the mapper. I believe we don't need any more views and everything should be covered by them. Please, also check some of my comments inline below.

Great, thanks!

Do you not worry that the file tree + tabbed interface will be a bit
small if it takes up a quarter of the screen?

> We should cater for both scenarios. But those "tinkering" with Plone are going to only 'tinker' with the editor as well — it's going to be only part of their Plone exploration and not necessarily large part. So we should prioritize those who will need to do the stuff for real in my opinion. We can not cater each and every — set strict priorities and adjust once a use case or an issue come.

Sure, but I think *discoverability* of Plone's (new) theming
capabilities is an important consideration.

> Will see what I can come up with as a simple boilerplate theme. But it's not going to happen in the coming days.

That would be great!

> In my mockups we don't need this as a separate view at all now — there is no separate file manager view, hence no need for a separate preview feature.

I do like the idea of integrating them. It was something we asked for
ideas on and wanted to do from the beginning.

Nathan, curious what you think of all this?

>>>      • The interaction betwen the panels should be more interactive. I have saved some elements in the panels without adding a new rule. What do I do next with that info? The info is not copied in my copy/paste buffer, the information is not copied to my rules file, for example. Probably it's not a task for this phase but this experience should be thought through. For now at least a toolbox (and the functionality of course) with a hint of what should I do now ("Want to create a rule for this selector?") should popup. Or we just don't allow selecting the elements outside of the add-new-rule process.
>> Interacting with the copy/paste buffer is a bit tricky if not done by user action, at least in some browsers.
>
> This means we disable selection outside of "add new rule" cycle I would say. The fact that we can do that [selecting elements just for the sake of selection] doesn't mean we should — this adds noise and questions that are left unanswered.

Ah, here I disagree somewhat.

I can see a lot of people (e.g. me) who want to build themes on the
filesystem wanting to use the selection capabilities of the the theme
mapper. The CSS-rule generator is more appropriate and useful than
what you get in e.g. Firebug, and the Esc-to-select-parent operation
is very useful for identifying containers. I don't particularly want
to lose this, even if it is somewhat a power-user feature.

>>       • Is it possible to save selector in the panels on click and not on Enter? This would be much more intuitive way of doing things. When I am working with applying rules I don't need to interact with content. If I need to check other pages I go to the site (that has the theme already applied by now) and check it there. Or we can have another button like "Interactive mode" for example. It should be disabled by default and no interaction should happen.
>> I thought it worked on click. It's supposed to, certainly - there's JS to intercept clicks when the rule selector is active. Which browser did you use?
>
> As my review says it's Google Chrome 18.0.1025.45 beta. Anyway everything is telling me that click doesn't work there. Even the help text below the panel:
>
> ""Hover over an element to see its selector. Press Esc to move the selection to its parent. Press Enter to save or confirm the selection."

Mmm, maybe we changed it. I'll need to look again.

Martin