18 Nov
2008
18 Nov
'08
11:51 p.m.
In my experience, what I find most confusing is the
modality of the
commands, and separation of similar commands:
- change user/group/other: this cake was cut in the other direction
compared to chmod/chown
- copy and move: I could see them merged, after all mv/cp/ln are kind
of polymorphic in the way they are used
- edit/settings/edit design: for PRPages, title is in edit, but
navigation title is in settings, and the structure name was in move or
add; tags would have their place in the edit dialog, and the
environment/css are redundant with edit design
Actually, each of these command groups shares an individual common superclass.
- The original version of Pier-Security used to have a split according
to chmod/chown/chgrp, however in pratice it has shown to be less
meaningful and forcing users to apply different commands for one
action. I found this split very powerful for sites like ese.unibe.ch
where there are many different groups (admin, assistant, student,
team-1, team-2, team-3, team-4) and lots of different users.
- Indeed copy/move are extremely similar (we should have links too). I
don't think that there would be a win if they would be merged. Copying
and moving is something very different.
- The split between edit and settings is somehow arbitrary, but it
makes perfectly sense if you are not the only one editing the site.
Editing is something editors do, designers need more rights and the
admins want to change different things. The navigation title is
something you don't want normal editors to change on the front-pages,
however it defaults to the page title so for pages lower in the tree
it works well. Personally I never use the edit design command, it only
provides access to a subset of possibilities one has with
environments. It does not work if you have many different designs on
one site.
Cheers,
Lukas
--
Lukas Renggli
http://www.lukas-renggli.ch