[Zope-CMF] CMF Usabiltiy

[David (Hamish) Harvey]

--On Friday, July 12, 2002 11:02:31 -0400 Shane Hathaway <shane@zope.com> 
wrote:

> P Kirk wrote:
>> [snip]
>>
>>> Why?  ExternalEditor lets you use *your* favorite tools (GoLive,
>>> FrontPage, gvim, Word, whatever) to edit content *as a local file*;
>>> it handles the messy bits of putting it back into Zope for you, *as
>>> you change it* (you do need to refresh the page in your browser manually
>>> at this point).  CMF + ExternalEditor is da bomb!

[snip]

>> It would seem to me that you are addressing usability for the webmaster.
>> This is also very important.  But I don't believe tis what was being
>> addressed in the original question.
>
> No, there's so much more that a strategy like ExternalEditor opens up:
>
> - Launching Word or OpenOffice when you click on a .DOC, and when you
> save, the changes are automatically stored on the server.
>
> - Editing UML or workflow diagrams.
>
> - Recording a sound file to go with a Wiki page.
>
> There are numerous possibilities.  The trick is to make it easy and quick
> to install the client-side application and at the same time not limit
> your user base.  Python is a big step in the right direction.

Hmm. OK, lack of vision on my part ;-) The client app is vitally important 
though, including getting people to accept it as safe. I tried an earlier 
version of EE (because I thought it was an excellent idea for myself!) and 
I couldn't get it to go in 10 minutes and ran out of time to spend on it. I 
should try it out again, perhaps.

Editing workflow diagrams. Now that *is* a cool idea. What about events in 
an pim appointment window ;-) I'm getting a feeling of "small pieces, 
loosely joined" here (http://www.smallpieces.com/ - though I've only read 
the introduction). Forget the web browser as platform, think of it as a 
gateway, perhaps?

I have a personal problem with .doc files on web sites anyway - anything 
that makes .doc harder for people to use is a Good Thing in my book ;-) 
Naturally if you use word in a company, then you will want to manage word 
docs through your CMS, and then that integration is great. I hadn't really 
appreciated the implications of the click to open, save and close to commit 
for *any* file type concept.

I have a site which I am hoping to persuade people to submit stuff to. 
Little things - news items, event details, and when I have time to 
implement it project summaries (in a standard form), and details of 
academic papers. Edit-in-page still seems the best strategy for this, and I 
find the idea of in-place editing for *real* wysiwyg quite exciting there. 
I might say that the site's been up for a couple of weeks, I even signed 
people up so they didn't need to, and no one's submitted anything yet, not 
even a link, but I live in hope.

Even in this scenario when you get to full page free form documents 
external editors might be the way to go, and of course there's no problem 
with allowing both approaches. How long until EE can rip apart a word doc, 
pull out the structure and figures, and push it into the CMS as well formed 
XHTML, separate images properly linked, with equations converted into 
MathML? That would be *really* sweet :-)

Thanks for putting me straight!
Hamish