Re: [Cmfcollectorng-develop] alternate CollectorNG user interface

[Andreas J. <an...@an...>]

Hi Kevin,

--On Donnerstag, 9. Januar 2003 11:02 -0800 Kevin Teague <kt...@bc...> 
wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I am working on an alternate skin for CollectorNG for use with my web
> site. There are a few reasons for this:
>
>  * I want to maintain consistency with my web site, and it has a
>    slightly different layout and look and feel than stock CMF or Plone

CMFCollectorNG does work again with the standard main_template of CMF
and it will work with Plone (90% done). The current collector_template
has been used in my company. I any case I would like to see that skins
should be i18n-aware.


>  * I'd like to have a slightly simpler tracker product, so I'm not using
>    the deadline section or the subcategories

Why can't you use standard HTML comments inside the skins?

>  * To integrate my installation of the CollectorNG with the rest of the
>    site. For instance, I am already storing a users contact information
>    elsewhere, so that information does not need to be provided when the
>    submit a bug.

Well, the current approach is driven by the need of the project I wrote
CMFCollectorNG for ;-) But I think it is a suitable solution for most
cases.

>
> We also have a support staff at work who use an older non-CMF tracker
> (ZShrink) which we've written a custom user interface for. This other
> tracker uses CMFMail to allow you to submit issues via email. The user
> interface is very simple and streamlined, and allows things like
> changing the priority and assignment of multiple issues in one form.
> Eventually I would like to migrate this user interface on top of
> CollectorNG if possible.

Christian Theune is already working on such a solution for CMFCollectorNG.
However I have not seen any code yet.

> Further down the road, I also might use the stock CollectorNG user
> interface if our developers want to take advantage of fields such as the
> deadline, subcategory, etc.
>

Don't understand...


> I am wondering if there any major changes planned under the hood of
> CollectorNG that would break alternate skins?

Not really. The current HEAD is pretty stable and don't plan any major
changes in the near future.


> And if alternate skins are provided, I wonder if provisions for choosing
> which skin is used for each CollectorNG instance should be a part of
> CollectorNG or if that decided from elsewhere in the portal?

I am not very familiar with the skin tool and the skin selection schema.
In my understanding you can control the order of the skins through
the skins tool and/or through siteaccess rules(?).


> I'll probably have something workable sometime next week, and I'll email
> out a URL for it then, and can consider making this alternate skin
> usable outsite of my site if there is any demand for it.

Ok, but will focus on an i18n aware skin (tesdal@irc is working on the
staff).

Cheers,
Andreas