Am 20.03.2011 um 09:35 schrieb Tudor Girba:
I believe that Alex wanted to say that the basic functionalities should be so self evident that they should not need documentation.
Regarding Pier, Lukas did an excellent job of building a content management system for programmers. You would not say about Seaside for example that it is bad because you cannot program it with drag and drop. It is the same for Pier. The main focus was to get it beautiful from a model point of view.
To add a user-friendly interface on top of it would require an explicit and new project on top of Pier. The infrastructure is there and is powerful.
Yes, basically everything is there. I tried to push some of my friends to use it. Everyone said that it is not easy to use but they also said that wordpress is not easy to use. That does not seem to be the problem. After I explained it a bit most of them founnd it more clear and more easy than other CMSses. So I think we shouldn't be too hard to ourselves. For all of them the bunch of links at the bottom was too disturbing to work with. Well, I have troubles to find the right link because there are so much of them in one place. So reducing the links to the necessary ones (for a normal user) and re-design the functionality sections commands, view and sitemap will do it a big deal. And well, there was one single point everybody mentioned and that seemed to be to biggest problem for them. Everyone was asking if there are "themes" or "templates" you can chose from. Just to repeat it no one had real technical problems with the system but they expect they can chose a template (they are as good in design as they are good in programming) which looks good and start with a half pre filled page. That seems to be the success story for wordpress. And the default theme of pier is only appealing to purists. So to marketeer pier I would go the ui way. Add support for 960.cs css framework (pier uses blueprint but a lot of people are more fond of 960.cs like me :) ). Then the command links of pier need to be layouted with bigger coloured areas (that have round corners :) ). Care should be taken that the pier look does not interefere with a template css. The links shouldn't be at the bottom. A comfortable sitemap component will help also. In my opinion that is not too much work but one that helps a lot. I would expect with these changes the hosting question would be important to me because all of friends would want to have one :) my 2 cents, Norbert
On 19 Mar 2011, at 21:48, Sean Allen wrote:
On Thu, Mar 17, 2011 at 1:28 PM, Alexandre Bergel <abergel@dcc.uchile.cl> wrote:
2) Yes. I have used and ported Pier, and presented it to non-Smalltalkers, and I have noticed that very small how-to or clarification things could delay me and would undoubtedly affect a non-Smalltalk user. (Some of it was just order of presentation - the how-to's that a non-Smalltalker wants first are not too hard to find - if you're a Smalltalker and so can guess where to look.) It would be good to watch people starting to use Smalltalk's 'best-practice' web suite and see what's slowing them.
There is no need of how-to's for Pier for basic usage (e.g., editing pages, adding menus, doing internal links, adding users). It is wrong to think this is necessary. I have never read the documentation of SimpleCMS, simply there isn't and there is no need to.
You are apparently much smarter than I. I struggled mightly w/ getting going with Pier and finally gave up and moved on to other things. I doubt I'm an outlier on that. I'd love if there was much better documentation but, I'm definitely not the person to do it as I still don't really get how to work with Pier. It is very non-intuitive for me.
Even if it is dirt simple to use, people are going to look at recipes, how-tos and general documentation when picking a CMS. Most people pick a CMS to make things easier not because they think 'o i really want to use X language'.
-Sean-
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