Etria Lists

First off, holy cow, congratulations on getting a great Quills 1.5 beta  
release out the door.  The improvement over the past few weeks is  
nothing short of astonishing.  The Plone community owes you a far  
greater debt of thanks than it yet realizes.

I've finally gotten around to actually installing Quills 1.5 on my  
Plone 2.5/Zope2.9.2 test instance, so I thought I'd share a few  
thoughts with y'all that may (or may not) be helpful as you push  
towards 1.5-final.

Most of these are pretty minor niggles, which I offer in the spirit of  
tremendous appreciation for all the hard work that Tim, Tom, Tom,  
Reinout and others have put into Quills over the past year (or more!)

-- The tag cloud and topic portlets both appear broken to me.  

-- It might be smart to enable topic, archive and maybe the Quills  
portlet by default so folks know they're there.

-- I found it odd that comments on entries seem to be disabled by  
default, with no way to switch the default, except on a per-entry  
basis, and then only in the properties tab.   That seems very clunky,  
and somewhat contrary to the spirit of blogging.  I know that Quills is  
currently using standard Plone commenting, which is weak generally.   
(Hopefully we'll be able to use Ploneboard Real Soon Now, but I  
digress.)

-- I love the idea of better management of trackbacks (both incoming  
and outgoing).  I do have a couple of usability concerns as it's  
currently implemented, though.

1) As i just blogged about  
(http://theploneblog.org/blog/archive/2006/07/03/blogging-comments- 
trackbacks-spam-and-akismet ), I think we are headed for a blog  
comment/trackback spam disaster.   But even if you disagree with my  
grim assessment, I think that the current UI for trackback spam  
management in Quills is not going to work.  Here's why:  my experience  
with trackback spam (and I have a lot) suggests that spambots tend to  
hit multiple posts at the same time, and often hit old posts.  Right  
now, the management of inbound trackbacks is on a per-post basis.   
That's going to make it hard to find and eliminate trackback spam  
across many entries.  Trackback management needs to be blog-wide --  
like comments management is now.   Ideally on the same screen as  
comment management, in fact.

2) I love the ability to send outgoing trackback pings.  But my  
experience is that this has to be automated (i.e. scan URLs in body to  
find links capable of receiving pings) if it's going to be used.   
COREBlog2 does this -- it should in theory be pretty easy to lift the  
code from there.

3) Even more useful than outgoing trackback pings, would be the ability  
to send pingback pings to the common blog tracking services  
(http://www.technorati.com and http://www.pingoat.com).  This has  
already been implemented in the qPingTool product, and it should be  
pretty simple to hack it into Quills.


-- The help text for "Only show excerpt in overview" is a bit  
misleading.  Instead of:
  "When enabled, only the excerpt of an entry will be displayed in the  
main weblog view. If no excerpt is provided then only the title will be  
displayed."

To me, this implies that the title won't be displayed.  Which is not  
correct.

I suggest:
  "When enabled, show only the title and excerpt in the main weblog  
view.  If an entry has no excerpt, only its title will be displayed."


-- When excerpt-only is enabled, the main weblog template needs an  
explicit "read more" link to invite a clickthrough to the full entry.

-- I think the main weblog template should include author info in each  
entry's listing. Most other blogs do.

-- Topic images seem to not work, now that we are using keywords.  I'm  
not sure topic images are really even needed, and would be fine if this  
feature was removed entirely.  Most blogs don't have this feature  
nowadays.

-- putting the blog title as the portlet header for portlet_quills  
feels a little odd to me.  I think I just want that to have a header  
that says "RSS Feeds."


That's about it.  I hope this is helpful feedback.

best,
jon

--------------
Jon Stahl, Program Manager
ONE/Northwest - Online Networking for the Environment
jon at onenw.org
skype: jonstahl  y!: jondstahl
206.286.1235x15

http://www.onenw.org
http://blogs.onenw.org/jon