Overall

• Change messages from the default popup (error/warning/info). It seems messy since there's already JavaScript's alerts and is not ergonomic. JSF-like messages are much better (they appear in a box above the form). The user only wants to correct his fields, the don't want to click any annoying popup.

  • eXo: request forwarded to Portal Team

• There's already a Groovy cache, to save compilation AFAIK. There could be also a HTML cache, that would cache the whole page, not a per portlet thing.

Language

• The Language Settings should use the locales-config.xml definitions (output-encoding and input-encoding) to encode request parameters. There are a lot of encoding problems through eXo (try to login with a fake username with accents, for instance)

  • eXo: request forwarded to Portal Team

Portlets and HTML rendering

• Don't render the div tags like VIEW-PAGEBODY, META-DATA-BLOCK, PORTLET-FRAGMENT, etc (or render the minimum required) with “display: none”. That pollutes the code, makes the downloading slower, loads the browser and confuses us with eXo's CSS. Rather these tags should not be shown by default but only in Edit Site, Edit Mode, etc. If that was done this way because of AJAX, it's much preferable for the web-designer to have a refresh than a end-user to have a bloated HTML.

  • eXo: Such a thing will be discussed internally in the new GateIn project as I would like in WCM a “production” site without this code.

• A decorator container. Something like a wrapper that would have a before and an after field that would surround it's contents.

  • eXo: don’t understand that point.

  • Rliu: Just like there are column, rows, tab and mixed container, it would be useful to have a “decorator container”. A container that would decorate it's content. Imagine (I had to do that) that I wan a PageBody with rounded corners. There are a lot of methods to do rounded corners in HTML/CSS, but only a few are applicable because there's no way to surround PageBody's content (a simple case: imagine I want a <div> tag before and a </div> after page content. Or a <center> or <table>, etc)

• Editing class/style tag of portlet's div is really useful (used a lot of times in this project I'm in). There should be a field for each of these (and maybe width/height would be unnecessary) in Portlet Settings tab.

  • eXo: that’s also part of WCM requirements for accessibility : I’d like to add a class property for each portlet instance and we have to remove the portlet id property for w3c compliance. We’re on the same wave 

• Portlet's id should be editable. Then I could use it as CSS selector and have meaningful id's in my HTML.

  • eXo: agreed, see previous answer.

• Navigation, Breadcrumb and Site Map should be done with server-side scripting.

• This is much less error-prone (another JavaScript error wouldn't break my script)

• We could use caching

• We could use IDE goodies

• And I think it's prettier, much more maintainable and the concept of versioning gets more reasonable.

Hey, guys

I'm an outsider, since I use GateIn/eXo a lot, I subscribed to this list. Some time ago I wrote to both Benjamin about some suggestions regarding the products I was using.

I'm forwarding the document we exchanged with comments by exo and me. I believe the suggestions concerning the Portal is pretty much valid still.

Could you give me a feedback for further discussions?

BTW, nice work. GateIn is looking amazing.

--
Rafael Liu
+55 61 9608-7722
http://rafaelliu.net

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