Re: [Framework-Team] Re: [Plone-developers] moving description to a viewlet
On 18 mei 2008, at 18:37, Martin Aspeli wrote: An object's description is intimately tied to its schema. A description renderer probably isn't a useful concept on its own. The decision on whether and how to render the description is part of the view logic of the object in question and should thus, IMHO, remain closely linked into the view template, not indirected away to a place where it's harder to manipulate. I just feel that the description is not part of the content. It is metadata: it describes what the object is about. As such it does not have business appearing in view templates, especially not in the way it does now. That is a mistake Plone made long ago, and something we should fix at some point. Yes, it was a bad choice to tie the description to the content back in the days. The problem started with placing the description widget at the top of the edit form while it should be at the bottom. After all, it is just before you save, you have to think of one or two sentences to describe WHAT the object is about for when people search for that item and see it in the listing. By placing it at the top, people always assume it is a lead in. Bad choice. Especially when people use it as a lead-in. Lead-ins are usually bad for search overviews. It hardly ever describes what the item is about. I think with a bit more discussion and input, we could arrive at this conclusion and consider a policy switch, but I think for 3.x the ship's sailed. For a lot of people, the way that Description is being used in views makes it a de-facto part of the content schema (rather than the metadata schema) and so something that users very much think of as a lead-in just as much as an abstract description for independent listings. We can't ignore that sunk assumption either. If people want a teaser or a lead-in, then the best way would be to add such a field. Then it's part of the content, can be placed on top of the edit form, just before the body (it's a lead-in after all). But I agree that the impact is maybe a bit too large. Danny Bloemendaal ___ Framework-Team mailing list Framework-Team@lists.plone.org http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/framework-team
[Framework-Team] Re: [Plone-developers] moving description to a viewlet
Previously Martin Aspeli wrote: -1 This is a fairly substantial (if subtle) change. As soon as you do this, everyone who's got a custom view template that follows the conventions (i.e. tons of third party products and custom content types) will start to see the description twice. That's unacceptable and will require everyone to rewrite. Fair enough. Turning a viewlet off for one type only is also a bit awkward. You end up having to customise for the given context type with a viewlet that renders nothing. Hmm hmm. Perhaps there is an abstraction or hook missing here. It's a shame the viewlet mechanism does not have an available flag like portlets do. Still, you could add that to the __call__ method. I'd rather just advise people to hide the documentDescription div with CSS if they want it gone site-wide, and to customise if they want it on a per-template basis. It's way easier to customise a template and remove or move a div than it is to find out where the damned viewlet came from. :) You'ld have to customize every view template for every content type in your site. That can be quite painful. For a site I'm working on now that would easily be over 20 separate templates. Creating/overriding a single viewlet is much simpler and much more maintainable. To make this argument a bit more general - viewlet managers are primarily slots in which generic UI can be plugged in. For example, if you have a tagging solution and want to show a tag cloud for all supported types, you could insert that as a viewlet without having to customise every template. Ditto with the way Iterate displays messages depending on whether the IWorkingCopy marker is set. I want something just as general. I want that bit of metadata (which the description really is, and if Plone didn't show it in so many places I would move it to a different fieldset as well) to go away from my content views everywhere. An object's description is intimately tied to its schema. A description renderer probably isn't a useful concept on its own. The decision on whether and how to render the description is part of the view logic of the object in question and should thus, IMHO, remain closely linked into the view template, not indirected away to a place where it's harder to manipulate. I just feel that the description is not part of the content. It is metadata: it describes what the object is about. As such it does not have business appearing in view templates, especially not in the way it does now. That is a mistake Plone made long ago, and something we should fix at some point. Wichert. -- Wichert Akkerman [EMAIL PROTECTED]It is simple to make things. http://www.wiggy.net/ It is hard to make things simple. ___ Framework-Team mailing list Framework-Team@lists.plone.org http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/framework-team
