Hi, I'm JT and these are my thoughts on community, content management, Plain Black, and WebGUI.
Hi, I'm JT and these are my thoughts on community, content management, Plain Black, and WebGUI.
At the WUC this year, and in this blog prior to that I talked about creating WebGUI Lite, which would be a less powerful, but also less complex version of WebGUI. This wouldn't be a different version of WebGUI, but rather a series of switches that would enable you to enable or disable just the functionality your site needs. We're still going to do that, but I'm starting to think that some of the default WebGUI Lite switches should be on in the main WebGUI distribution. More specifically, workflow and versioning.
Starting with WebGUI 7 we released a powerful workflow and versioning combination that keeps track of your asset changes, allows you to group those changes under a version tag, and then go through a workflow approval process. With WebGUI 7.4 we started implementing the switches we were going to need for WebGUI Lite. Three of these switches are used to turn off version comments, to commit content immediately upon hitting the save button (rather than "commit my changes"), and to commit content in realtime, rather than handing it off to Spectre. The net effect of these three switches is that WebGUI 7 works more like WebGUI 5, in that it hides the workflow and versioning processes from the user.
I now think these three switches should be set up this way from the start. And then if you need workflow and versioning on your site you can change them. I believe we made the easiest to use workflow and versioning system on the market. Despite this though, I think it decreases adoption of WebGUI, because people believe that they have to use it even if they don't want it. I also believe that the users who were clamoring for it, wanted to know it was an option, more than they wanted it in reality. So for these reasons, I think that we should default to the ease of use option rather than the muscle flexing option.
And going forward, there are probably several other changes like this we can make. The goal should be to make WebGUI as simple as possible out of the box, and then let the power users tweak it as they see fit.
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User:
koen
Date: 11/12/2007 11:42 am |
Rating: 6
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Status: Archived |
I agree absolutely.
A default WebGUI installation should give you the ability to choose styles and enter some content into that site without any hassle.
All the muscles should be in there, but they only need to be flexed when there is real need for that. But then, when you do need them muscles, they where there all the time.
Using power needs training or, as my former co-owner at ProcoliX used to say: learn to walk first, then pick up running, or swimming or scuba-diving. 
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User:
ehab
Date: 11/13/2007 10:25 am |
Rating: -19
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Status: Archived |
BTW some people can not walk but can scuba. :)
Ehab Heikal
www.elmotaheda.com , www.mashy.com
Quote: An eye for an Eye only helps make the whole world blind
Gandhi
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User:
baylink
Date: 11/12/2007 12:45 pm |
Rating: 8
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Status: Archived |
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User:
JT
Date: 11/12/2007 4:15 pm |
Rating: -3
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Status: Archived |
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User:
ehab
Date: 11/13/2007 10:23 am |
Rating: 12
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Status: Archived |
I can not contain my happiness that you are seeing more eye to eye with us. With your new presite questions that are in the demo of 7.4 you could make the advanced options settable from the begining and then settable from the admin console. That would be perfect.
And yes I know it takes a really open minded person to design a really powerfull system and then be able to see how the normal user will see it.
Bravo again.
Ehab Heikal
www.elmotaheda.com , www.mashy.com
Quote: An eye for an Eye only helps make the whole world blind
Gandhi
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User:
fathertorque
Date: 11/14/2007 8:10 am |
Rating: 6
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Status: Archived |
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User:
JT
Date: 11/14/2007 12:32 pm |
Rating: 1
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Status: Archived |
It's not about the switches. It's about the ease of use of WebGUI. Besides, your argument is irrelevant, as the switches were already implemented in 7.4 as I mentioned in my blog post. Now it's just about deciding what the default state of those switches should be.
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User:
baylink
Date: 11/14/2007 9:06 pm |
Rating: 8
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Status: Archived |
Wow. *I'm* jumping to *JT*'s defense?
On a *design issue*?? :-)
You guys are nuts; he's exactly right here: some people need workflow and versioning, and you have to implement the simple version in terms of them if you want them at all, but the default should indeed be to hide them; now that I have those switches in 7.4, I turn them on by default myself.
When someone says "wouldn't it be nice if" I say "I'll go turn it on for you."
What *I* would like to see is for the on-ness of it to *depend on the user's UI level*. Users of whatever level and up have to commit by hand, and those of a lower level autocommit -- or perhaps it could be by group.
On some sites, clearly, you want to force it, but I suspect not all.
Incidentally, I did a 7.4.14/0.8.0 install the other day in about 11 minutes, front to back.
Better than 3 weeks... :-)
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User:
JT
Date: 11/15/2007 9:05 am |
Rating: 5
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Status: Archived |
I'd call those last two sentences to be one of the most glowing reviews of WebGUI/WRE of all time, considering that you have been a long time critic of such things. It's nice to hear that occasionally we even please the critics. =)
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User:
baylink
Date: 11/17/2007 0:22 am |
Rating: -8
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Status: Archived |
Today, it was 9 minutes. :-)
And that was
Yes, I'd have to say we've got the installation part down pretty cold these days.
And for those who weren't playing along at home, roughly this time 4 years ago, I tried my first install: 5.6 or so on RedHat 7.
4 weeks later (no, I'm not kidding), I still didn't have it running.
JT and I don't always see eye to eye on design, but I certainly can't fault his code.
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User:
knowmad
Date: 12/1/2007 1:13 pm |
Rating: -1
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Status: Archived |
I like the idea of hiding versioning and only enabling on demand. I'm trying to figure out if the following scenario would be supported under the new changes that have been added.
We'd like user updates to be immediately committed. However, we, as developers, would like to be able to create a version tag and work under it without affecting the users. Does this make sense? Would this work?
William
----
Knowmad Technologies
http://www.knowmad.com
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User:
martink
Date: 11/12/2007 10:14 am |
Rating: 10
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Status: Archived |
Although I think this is a good idea for attracting more users to WebGUI, it is also a waste not to demonstrate the sheer power of WebGUI to people who need (or think they need) that. So maybe it is an idea to have to demo site system for WebGUI lite as well as WebGUI with all it's power unleased.
