Re: [Openinteract-dev] What is OpenInteract2 ?

[<an...@io...>]

I'm sorry to be quoting this quite extensively since the former posts 
did never make it to this list.

Salve J Nilsen wrote:
> Antti M Vähäkotamäki wrote:
>> Well to make this clear from the beginning - I'm not in any way 
>> against you building new templates. They will be needed for sure. I'm 
>> just trying to look at the bigger picture.
>>
>> Salve J Nilsen wrote:
>>
>>> Urgh... I'm sorry about that. OI2 is definitly a application framwork 
>>> (where of "CMS" is only a minor part.) I didn't mean to cause this 
>>> confusion. :-\
>>
>> Well what I was thinking was more in the lines of OI2 not being even 
>> partly a CMS.
> 
> I'm sure you can mold OI2 into whatever you want it to be... :-)

Well I just don't see that the products being developed on OI2 as a part 
of OI2. They run on OI2, they can be used to promote OI2, but they are 
not part of OI2.


>> Sure I would heartly welcome a package which would implement all kinds 
>> of CMS functionality on top of OI2, and an another package which would 
>> provide a bucketfull of general TT2 templates which are easily 
>> themable by pure CSS, but I'm not sure if either of these should be 
>> included in the base packages IF they are to provide a general base 
>> for applications.
> 
> I think having a functional website with CMS, news and security features as
> part of the "base" is not only good, but the Sensible Thing to Do. OI2's 
> CMS
> features (e.g. page management and publishing, user/group management, 
> interface
> consistency features, templates, logging framework, etc.) may be a bit 
> lacking
> (in consistency, standards compliance, visual beauty and so on.) but having
> them available from a basic install quite important. Who do you think 
> would be
> impressed by a application framwork one can't test and experiment with?

Again, I'm not saying that developing this stuff is bad and it shouldn't 
be done. As you state, it's vital that there exists some ready code to 
experiment with and to reuse when needed, BUT making this code a part of 
OI2 base is not in any way vital for making it experimentable or reusable.

One could argue that it probably actually hinders the reuse value of 
base packages that they are distributed as bulk and thus their 
interfaces never need to be polished for reusability.

When you use OI2 in production, you probably do not want those OI2 base 
modules present which you don't use since they take lot's of space in 
memory when the memory consumption is alrealy huge. And since it is hard 
to separate them or use them selectively, you are usually better off 
with just replacing the needed parts alltogether.


>> So probably the bigger question here is the meaning of base packages - 
>> what are they for?
> 
> They're there so you can get a notion of what's possible to do OI2, and 
> when
> you've seen _that_, the _real_ big questions show up: How can I use OI2? 
> How
> can I improve OI2? What should be improved? How easy is it to improve 
> OI2? How
> can I make it easier to improve OI2? What should be improved so OI2 becomes
> easier to improve?

I don't think that every user who writes his application on OI2 should 
be an OI2 developer. In fact I think that OI2 developers' main goal 
should be that none of OI2's users should need to be OI2 developers.

I do agree with you that at the moment we aren't quite there yet ;-) but 
it doesn't change the goal.


>> Also currently the building block TT2 templates for OI2 website aren't 
>> even in a base package but they are directly in the website's template 
>> directory. This makes them impossible to be substituted or modified 
>> through the management system with packages. I'm not sure if the 
>> current theme implementation can be used to override these (we are 
>> using it only to load a single theme which causes a constant 50ms 
>> addition to each request ;-) ), but if we are getting rid of the 
>> current theming for a CSS only theming, we can't do this anymore and 
>> the whole thing should be rethought.
> 
> I'm sure you can find or formulate some bug reports that describe what your
> problems are. <http://jira.openinteract.org/> ;-)
> 
> (And yes, the theme implementation sucks :)

Well in fact I'm trying to formulate it by doing this discussion. I have 
already filed a JIRA issue for a possibility to create a clean OI2 
website wihout the base packages. Chris asked me if this was necessary 
and I'm trying to figure it here also myself by discussing the issue ;)

- Antti