A carrot:
- The way I see it there is
- the UI which is icing.
- the features which is the cake. Features determine what users can and can't do and how they will work with them.
- Eating the cake is UX. Both together make a nice experience
- If your features are a turd then a nice UI still means you are eating a turd.
- Plone is not a turd but it has certain features that don't work together well or are clumsy or just aren't easy enough. If you are interested in what they are see my 2015 talk - https://www.slideshare.net/djay/5-things-still-too-hard-in-plone-5-54158231
What are carrots?
- python 3 is a bit of a carrot but not a great one
- fixing resource registries isn't a carrot. Anything that helps developers is hard to sell to end customers. It just doesn't work saying "please pay X to ugrade to plone 6, it will make my life easier".
- New features is a carrot. Personalisation. Better search. Social media integration.
- Optional headless is probably a carrot since some customers do want quicker pages and more custom apps. So not for everyone so not a great carrot
- Better UX is a good carrot. Plone is a CMS. Better management of content is the goal.
Pastanga UI
- Looking at the slides it doesn't promise mosaic. In fact it promises little but new icons.
- One thing it does promise is to reduce the items on the toolbar. But it says nothing about what happens to the features those other buttons support. This is a really complex issue see https://github.com/plone/Products.CMFPlone/issues/802 and https://github.com/plone/Products.CMFPlone/issues/711 https://github.com/plone/Products.CMFPlone/issues/1475, https://github.com/plone/Products.CMFPlone/issues/703 and lots more. Point is it needs to be considered carefully, not just hey, lets just make it simpler by removing things...
Headless
- Pastanga UI doesn't require headless. It is admin only UI. We can have admin being JS only and the frontend still server side rendering
- However somehow pastanga is going to have to work with plugins, control panel, autoform etc etc. If the goal is to replace everything then I can't see it happening any time soon and the backwards compatibility hump for integrators to overcome will kill plone.
- Serverside rendering will be with us for a long time. I think some companies have gone all in and that suits their market and their development teams. They see the future as headless only. Other companies don't work that way. Governments like UK require progressive enhancement. I think its far to early to go all in on headless so therefore we have to support both.
Conclusion
- Without a carrot Plone is hard to sell. Thats bad for everyone.
- Tackling the hard UX problems is the carrot. New icons is not. Plone 5 was mostly new icons. It didn't sell well. We don't want another plone 5.
- We need to work out how to tackle the hard UX problems that our end users face (not us because we have stockholm syndrome). They are hard because everyone wants consensus yet everyone has an opinion and we don't personally experience the problems.
- We have limited resources. Switching everything to react/vue/angular/nextjs framework seems like a LOT of work and risky. but if we have the resources...
- On the other hand no one seems to want to work on mosaic code which is using jquery.
- Mosaic only fixes one turd. There are others. folderless/Default pages, sharing/workflow, placeless content. Castle has solved some of these.
So we are at an impasse right? But we are smart people... we can work a way out... and I don't think it requires a resort holiday in italy to do it 