On 2/13/06, Robert Jones <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Thanks for copying me in Tom. I agree completely about learning from each > others work. I look at SchoolTool once in a while, and apart from the > obvious quality of the coding and application design, I am always reminded > that you have real web designers working for you! The bits of FreeMIS that > don't rely on the SchoolTool design look a bit rough in comparison! One of > these days I'll pretty it up.
One thing I haven't announced yet (I'm not sure when it is "official," but everything is in place) is that a Dutch Zope company called Infrae (http://infrae.com) is going to start doing some work on SchoolTool. They're best known for the Silva document management system, so they've got experience putting together complex, good looking web apps. They've also got Zope 3 development experience. > I fear that you may learn from FreeMIS more by seeing where I have gone wrong > than by my glorious successes! > > Have you guys considered the limitations of the overall web design? I know it > seems a little churlish of me to borrow your design and then criticise it, > but I've realised that as the number of navigation items and associated > actions grow it is getting a bit awkward to use - the actions tend to > disappear off the bottom of the screen. It's a shame, as the design is a > beautiful piece of work. Yes, we're definitely thinking the same thing. We were planning on doing a bit more of a UI reorganization in the fall, but as that was happening, our original web design contractors, Etria LLP, dissolved themselves, and we've had a bit of a design vacuum. I think we can get through version 1.0 without major changes, but there are clearly limits to the scalability of the current design. > I am, of course, hoping that you'll come up with an excellent solution that I > can share, but in the meantime I am pondering alternatives - it's always > going to be hard to get easy access to all the functionality of a complex > application whilst at the same time keeping the look clean and preventing the > need to scroll down. > > As regards the actual guts of the applications, our core data structures are > pretty similar, but there is very little overlap in the functionality we have > built on top. I guess we may look to collaborate more as we see bits of each > others functionality that we want to implement. Or maybe not! Actually, we've got a lot of new functionality, which you can check out at http://demo.schooltool.org (login: teacher001, pwd: teacher001). > Anyway, it's good to see the whole "open source school information system" > project moving forward on several fronts. Agreed. --Tom _______________________________________________ Schooltool mailing list [email protected] http://lists.schooltool.org/mailman/listinfo/schooltool
