On July 29th, the CMS User Interface group held their second online meeting to discuss the key UI aims and the initial feature list.
In attendance were (cast by order of appearence):
- Dave Bauer
- Carl Robert Blesius
- Dirk Gomez
- Mark Aufflick
- Jun Yamog
We based our agenda on the feature list, aiming to sign off on agreed descriptions of the main feature areas. Once these descriptions and goals are agreed, the UI group will progress to building a thorough click-through prototype which can form the basis of the user interface implementation.
In one and a half hours we covered roughly half of the areas, and the group will reconvene at a time to be set to cover the second half. The agreed areas are detailed below.
Top 5 UI aims
- Something that works
- Something that we can add to
Signed off points
- Storage
- Everything is stored in the Content Repository
- We (package developers) fix how the content is stored:
- binary: file system
- else: database
- Content types
- We create a number of standard useful content types, with an agreed collection of metadata
- We create an easy way for a programmer to add extra content
types
- Basically a bunch of nice tcl wrappers to make it simple - these wrappers should become part of the CR package, and may take a form similar to the new workflow create_from_spec
- Content Creation
- HTML File Upload
- We will strip out the body section + title + keywords and create content items from this
- Specifically, we will ignore any css stylesheets linked or contained in the file
- There will be a facility to upload a file/folder hierarchy in a zip file
- The following content creation widgets will be used according to user preference and browser capability. (Non-existing widgets to be made available to OpenACS core as standard form builder widgets)
- MSHTML
- cross-browser gui
- lars enhanced text
- HTML source
- Revisioning
- We will use CR's built in revisioning mechanism
- Every save creates a new revision
- The default edit button opens up the LATEST revision (as
opposed to the LIVE revision, which may not be the same)
- There is also an option to view a side-by-side colorised diff of any two versions of text or html content (or other content type where it makes sense)
- Urls
- All articles have a "name" and a "title". The name is
used for the url, the title for Human readable stuff
- The folder path is the url base and the name is the end
- The content creator can use symlinks if they want to put it in two places at once
Note that not all the finer points of detail in the feature list were discussed, and the above guidelines allow scope for the relevant UI designers some flexibility, while ensuring that the outcome meets the CMS group's core aims.
For further reference, you can view the chat logs (jump down to [14:00:44]) or email me: Mark Aufflick.