[ZDP] Portal congrates/comments

[Maik Roeder]

Hi Martijn !

Martijn Faassen wrote:
> First of all, very very impressive, this ZDP portal. And to think I
> started the ZDP project -- the far majority of all kudos and credits
> and zen-points go to everybody else now, definitely!

Yes, we have come a long way, indeed :-)
 
> There are of course some interface nits that can still be improved,
> as I've seen others comment too.

Yep.
 
> For instance, I think perhaps you should limit the contributed stuff to
> plaintext or structured text, and disable HTML.

I have made txt the only (hidden) choice for anonymous users. Managers
can still choose between html, txt and stx. The following does the trick:

<dtml-var "content.raw" html_quote newline_to_br>

> This would allow you to liberally use < and > in text without having
> to quote it manually. Manually adding &lt; and &gt; everywhere is a pain.

Right.

> Then there is probably a way to unclutter various areas. Take the
> categories listing. Currently it looks like this:
> 
>      intro text                      topic
> 
>                                      topic
> 
>                                      topic
> 
> What you could do is simply place the intro text *above* the listing
> with topics; people are looking for the listing with topic anyway, and
> currently it's hard to find for my 'web eyes'.

I have changed it as you said. 
 
> Another point is that the top list of links (and the graphic of the mole, etc)
> is currently too large. Users expect the relevant info directly, and
> now I have to scroll down. That list of links could be significantly
> flattened to take up 1/10th of the space. (also I'm not sure if you
> need the 3 links there to zope.org, oswg.org and codecatalog.com..perhaps
> you can put them somewhere else).

I have removed these 3 links. I think the other links don't cause
too much additional space to be wasted, because of the height of
the logo.

> The 'search' could be put to the side
> as well (left side seems fine).

On the front page, I have moved the search below the portals, so
the front page is focused more on the portals.

> Besides these interface comments the underlying technology is quite
> cool; it was easy to add a new FAQ and such (except for the quoting
> business. It was a bit harder to add a topic; I wanted to add a
> link to the 'grokking OO' howto under Developers > OO Programming, but
> ended up adding some description first, *then* a link, and it's all hard
> to see and a bit too much work.

Tom is working on some howtos which explain how to add stuff to the ZDP.

I have changed your link to grokking OO to contain the text that you
have added to the topic. The topic now does not have an explanation,
and I am not sure whether this title is so good. Maybe Understanding
OO would be clearer.

> Anyway, great work! Perhaps I'll start adding some XMLWidgets documentation
> on there..

The most important thing right now is to add valuable links to quality
information into the topics. So, for the time being you can put all
stuff on Zope.org, but make sure that the community that this stuff
is interesting for has got a pointer to it in the right subject and
topic.

Thanks very much for your comments ! I think we are already a step
closer to where we want to be, but we still have a long way to go ;-)

Greetings,

Maik Röder