[Zope-Moz] DISCUSS: The theory behind the interface

[Paul Everitt]

Howdy all.  It appears that we are a few short steps away from having
useful features in Mozilla revealing themselves.

At the same time, the PTK project is contemplating some user interface
thoughts.  Here is a post I made this week that I then rolled into the
docs:

  http://weblogs.userland.com/zopeNewbies/discuss/msgReader$312

I'd like to see this week if zope-mozilla has any ideas about how we
might share ideas, concepts, jargon, etc. between these two initiatives
(PTK and zope-mozilla).

At the highest level, the tinkering we are doing with a PTK interface is
founded in one idea: focus on content managers.  The Zope Studio, it
appears, is focused on one of two goals:

  o Improve the current idiom

  o Model a real studio environment

It appears that either of these directions really produces the same
focus: improve the productivity of developers or higher end content
managers.

Thus some questions pop to mind:

1) Can the Zope Studio idea be extended to really meaning _two_ studios,
one for content managers and one for developers?

2) Either way, can some ideas be shared between the two?  For instance,
the proposed PTK model changes the appearance of the "right hand side". 
Moreover, it changes the behavior; when you click on an item, you view
it.  While viewing it, you get an option to manage it.  If the Zope
Studio has a way to make "double-click to manage" a standard idiom, this
should be shared.

3) We've thought about having a mode for better browsers that had an
Outlook-style "Bar" on the left that had icons for Documents, Images,
Links, News, Surveys, Polls, and all the other portal content.  If there
was a version of the Zope Studio for content managers, could this be
better done in the Studio?

I'll stop here for now.  Though it might be premature to talk about all
this, I would like the zope-mozilla folks to keep an eye out when we
post the PTK docs and mockups this week.

--Paul