Why is Volto "overriding" classical dexterity types

Development Plone 6 UI (Volto)
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I'd like to understand the rationale behind this decision. Is there any documentation, talks or discussions about this?

The whole thing was triggered by some discussions where I was mentioning that I enable the blocks behavior for News and Events, because, really, that's what makes sense when you have a Volto website.

I don't think there's any Plone website "in the wild" that enables viewing the same content item with both Volto and Plone classic. We have websites where we use Volto for the whole site and Plone Classic for a "legacy section" that wasn't ported, but viewing the same item in both UIs is a no-no. We've toyed, in the beginning, with making the items compatible and available in both UIs, but the effort wasn't worth it, because, realistically, only website webmaster would be concerned with viewing an item in the old Plone Classic, and even that only in limited cases. Once we grew more comfortable with Volto, we didn't feel the need to view a content item in Plone Classic. As a webmaster, I may use the /edit Plone Classic interface for an item, to double-check some behavior.

In my opinion this would allow a "peacefully" co-existence between Volto and Classic content in the same site. As well as allowing smooth-er migrations from Classic sites to Volto.

I don't think this is a real problem. Yes, it may help co-existence and smoother migrations, but let me tell you, from the experience of migrating several website from Plone classic to Volto, that co-existence is relevant for exactly one or two weeks, while you build a working Volto frontend. After that, nobody will care. Don't complicate it, there's no imaginary developer or website that would be helped by making these two worlds, the Classic UI and Volto, more compatible with each other. Once you make a decision to move in Volto's direction, there's no going back. You may decide, in the beginning, to stick with Classic, which is fine, hopefully, at one point, the Volto frontend would provide enough of a value proposition that it would be a good idea to migrate.

1 Like
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@tiberiuichim Thank you very much for your detailed and interesting answer.

But, no offence, it doesn't answer the "why instead" I've mentioned before.

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Because it would have represented additional work, that would have enabled a use-case that didn't exist for all parties involved at that time.

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@tiberiuichim Thanks for your clarifying answer to this rather technical question.

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:fire: makes sense to me.
We would need to distinguish between what is inside that page. For example if the page held images for the purpose of content on that page, that's different than if it held a news item or another page. Initially, it may be easier to allow manually marking of a page as part of the site hierarchy.

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@mekell

I'm not sure what type of answer you want. You want a technical reason when the deciding factor in this matter is the human factor. "Why X was done instead of Y?" Because the people who did X decided that Y wasn't important for them.

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I'm sure that those who decided to do it that way they did it with the best intentions in mind and trying to cover as much as they knew at that moment. I really do very much admire and respect all the work done!

But what I'm trying to point out is that in my opinion there are some points (see my comments on those) that might have been overseen and that today might be leading to some serious issues and that those former decisions could be (if necessary) eventually reconsidered and (if agreed) maybe refactored.

I would very much appreciate if somebody responsible for that parts in the code could "unemotionally" consider the points I'm making. I may be wrong, but even if this were the case, technical arguments are always more convincible.

And maybe there are others in the community for whom such issues are also important.

After all we are in an open source community. Aren't we?

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@mekell

today might be leading to some serious issues

What are those issues? It's not clear to me what the root of the problem is. Sorry, maybe I'm not reading this thread careful enough, but I've been going through it several times and I still don't understand what bothers you and what real, solid, action steps you propose and who should do them.