Thanks for the time taken to read it Thomas.

I actually didn't opened JIRAs because my features requests were being refused because they weren't user friendly. That document actually was to discuss this philosophy..

I do think keeping it user friendly is the way to go, but what good does it do if we can't address user's needs? I've been doing some PoCs and presentations with GateIn/eXo and our main competitors here (Liferay, Lumis and sometimes IBM) have features I always get asked about, and I have to say "we don't have it, but it can be done".. and it's not only Content Management features.

On Mon, Jan 11, 2010 at 12:16 PM, Thomas Heute <theute@redhat.com> wrote:

Thank you Rafael !

First we should keep portal and WCM discussions seperated, GateIn is about the portal so I leave the WCM part apart.

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


Agreed, do you know if a Jira was opened ? I don't think there is one on GTNPORTAL, we should keep this requirement for furture evolution of WebUI so feel free to add a Jira.


Just opened it: https://jira.jboss.org/jira/browse/GTNPORTAL-475

  • 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.

There are already multiple layers of cache, what would be interesting would be to return the correct Last-Modified on HTTP Response but it's tricky to get. How do you see your HTML cache working with invalidation ?

Sorry, I was thinking about eXo WCM when I wrote it.

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


If there are encoding issues, please report them.

Encoding problems I faced in previous version seem to be fixed.
 

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.

Not sure if they are required, looks like semantic info

Precisely: they has nothing to do with user's portal. That's why I think it "pollutes the code, makes the downloading slower, loads the browser and confuses us with eXo's CSS"


  • 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)

A wrapper around a page ? around a content of a layout ? Not sure I understand neither :-/

It would be just a new kind of container (besides columns, rows, mixed and tabbed). It could contain a portlet, the Page Content or even another container.

  • 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


This is the dreaded issue of the admin portal, the problem is to draw the line between administrators and developers. Some people will want limited but easy to understand UI and others will want advanced UI, that leads to your introduction and you are 100% right.

Actually I was discussing this with people from eXo portal. And I do think GateIn should keep user friendly, but there are way to conceal it with advanced features like the ones I wrote in the beginning: eclipse-like perspectives (like basic and advanced), role based perspectives (like a developer role) or simply an “advanced” button. "Keeping it simple" shouldn't be the reason for not implementing a feature..
 

  • 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.

True.

Opened a jira: https://jira.jboss.org/jira/browse/GTNPORTAL-476

  • 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.


This is already the case in portal AFAIK.

Yeah, just checked it. That wasn't the case in previous eXo portal versions =) Nice
 

Thomas.









On 01/04/2010 02:22 PM, rafael liu wrote:
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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Rafael Liu
+55 61 9608-7722
http://rafaelliu.net