Casey Neehouse made minutes from todays chat - thanks:
<minutes>
Participants:
Niels Hartvig, Per Ploug Hansen, John Cruz, Casey Neehouse, Bob Baty-Bar, Morten Bock, Søren Sprogoe, Daniel Bjørnbakk, Kenneth Sølbergø, Jesper Ordrup, John Hodgkinson, DouglasRobar, Ismail, Boris Masis, Warren Buckley, Christian Palm, Ryan Roberts, Sean McGonagle, Simon Justesen, Christian Sparre
Chat Notes:
Introductions all around...
Discussion of expectations:
Morten - to gain knowledge of the roadmap and how it will be executed.
Soren - no real expectations - just wants to stay up to date. Ideas for the website.
Niels - to see who to get involved.
John H. - no expectations either
Per - to get feedback
Niels informed us that Microsoft Germany has provided an MSI installer. This will provide a simplified means to install umbraco for novice users by checking for prerequisites such as ASP.NET 2.0, AJAX.NET, SQL Server, Set up IIS site, and build necessary connection strings.
Per and Niels started refactoring the umbraco UI yesterday. YUI was chosen for the foundation, with scriptaculo-us for effects. ASP.NET AJAX controls for client/server communications with script-enabled web services.
The whole UI will be rewritten to be based off of YUI.
With sponsorship (anyone interested), there will be an effort to implement an Accessible interface as well.
Casey brought up control refactoring, which brought in several comments, and created need for an additional topic. Validation became a major point of discussion, and control configuration was mentioned. To be revisited later....
Per provided us some screenshots of the new UI, and explained some of the more important changes:
- The create button becomes a menu, allowing for the user to create new items from any of the sections.
- Also, the Sections have been moved into a section menu as well, creating more room for the tree.
Create menus and Section menus will both support shortcuts, in which you can drag items from the content tree to the menu to create shortcuts to common locations. This will be user-based (possibly global/group shortcuts as well). - Per also discussed the new internal search. Search will integrate Auto Suggest features for node names as well as search across different sections. There will be an advanced search that will allow you to search into more detailed metadata. There will also be a means to save Searches to allow for easy search at later times. There will also be an API to allow extensions to become searchable, allowing you to easily have umbracoo insert the data into the index.
- Niels explains how the search would be savable, or Instant Dashboards could be created.
- Back to UI, there will be a few widgets globally available. First of which is Modal Dialogs, Panels (for the Speech Bubble), and simple dialogs.
- The tree will be rewritten to allow for drag-n-drop moving, copying, and sorting. The context menus will be extended to allow for custom actions as well.
John Cruz has started implementing Membership Providers to allow for support of LDAP/AD, and your custom member DB for authentication. This should be released in v 3.1.
Back on topic of the Editor Controls, Default Values, Better Validation Controls, and Configuration methods. Discussions varied between approaches, but the consensus led to a property editor interface for DataType settings, and string values and key/value collections interfaces for Document Type settings. Due to lack of Volunteers, this will be placed on a wish list.
The chat then moved to templates, and the possible use of Master Pages in place of the built-in template system. Discussion was mixed about the effectiveness of such implementation. Research will be given to see the effectiveness.
Action Handlers were next discussed, as they will be moved to the CMSNode class, to allow for global inheritance. Thus, most items in umbraco will be able to use actionhandlers. Also, some other API changes to allow for extensions to self register, versus the database table approach.
Moving on to the repository, Niels nominated Bob, Doug, Warren, and Casey to act as a team to get that up to par. A form to allow for package submissions would be available for install/testing/approval.
Package discussion also went into Upgrades and Uninstalls. Uninstalls scare Niels, so, the conversation was postponed... Uninstalls by practice could be very dangerous, and could break a lot of things, so, they should be taken lightly.
Help came to discussion, and a team will be formed to handle basic help as well.
I am sure I missed some stuff....
</minutes>
Casey, you didn't miss much but next chat will be October 9th 19.00 GMT+1. The room will be open on the same url for anyone to use, so feel free to use it to discuss something that would take too long on the forum. Also; look in the forum on Tuesday around 19.00 GMT+1 - could be fun to have some regular stuff going on.