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#175: Expose more settings in the Control Panel

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by Alexander Limi — last modified March 7, 2007 - 00:12

There are a lot of common settings that you still have to reach for the ZMI to adjust.

Proposed by

Alexander Limi

Seconded by

Martin Aspeli

Proposal type

User interface, Architecture

Assigned to release

Plone 3.0

State

completed

Motivation

This is kind of a meta-PLIP, since it has no measure of "success" or not - it is merely a collection of things we'd like to do to improve the control panel structurally. It does not really introduce "new" code as such, outside of some new templates and saving the values back to the correct places in the Plone hierarchy.

There are a lot of common settings/adjustments that people do that currently need to enter the ZMI to get at. Especially the security-related ones are quite intimidating (e.g. closing the portal so that anonymous users can't join), and can have dangerous side effects if done improperly.

This PLIP aims to identify as many of the common settings/changes as possible, and move them to a friendlier interface.

Proposal

Let's try to list the low-hanging fruit that should be easy to expose in the control panel. For a list of already implemented changes see the implementation section.

Possible control panels:

Themes:

Ability to edit footer (should be an unindexed content object, so it can be translatable with LinguaPlone too)
Ability to upload logo and change colors
Add option to disable the content type icons

File Mappings

Expose Content Type Registry as a control panel "File Mappings"

Implementation

So far the following items from the initial proposal have been implemented:

Some rearrangement of the "Site settings" configlet - it has stuff from all over, there should be a separate configlet with all the mail-related settings, for instance. Ideally the Portal configlet should vanish into the other configlets - it's all site settings anyway. :)
Can anonymous join the site? (Add portal member permission for anonymous on/off)
Types panel (see separate PLIP
Ability to disable JS for link globe
Ability to make all external links show up in new window
Ability to make generated.css login-only (not relevant anymore as we don't use that file anymore)

Risks

There's a chance this PLIP might span a couple of releases, depending on how much work we get done in time. Whatever is committed should therefore be production quality, and draft/non-functioning code should not be checked in.

Progress log

As this is a meta-PLIP, it won't really have a bundle at the initial review bundle deadline.

Please add comments if you have ideas on other things could easily be done.

Participants

Alexander Limi
Martin Aspeli
Hanno Schlichting

"It's my ball so I make up the rules" or...

Posted by David Groos at October 3, 2006 - 21:37

There is lots of logic on plone's part in not allowing site managers to provide members much lee-way in deciding color, background, font size and many of those things simply editable with FCKeditor. "We want Plone to look professional, it is a big time CMS and if a page had big pink letters it might make Plone look bad". OK, this is my paraphrasing/summarizing/humorafying of things I've read about why plone doesn't allow simple programming-ignorants such as I to enable these capabilities in Plone.

But...

Sometimes big pink-green-orange letters with blue-red-blue text backgrounds are great and add to the power of Plone. If you want to expand into the middle-school market ;) Get off those staid old-timer legs and let site managers decide which of FCK editing tools should be usable. I promise to put up a disclaimer to the effect that 'looks for this site are to be blamed on crazy kids and site managers, not on Plone or Plone developers'.

Thanks for listening to my rant...

PS--Plone is great. I wouldn't throw stones at strangers... Thanks for your work.

A bit confused why this comment is here...

Posted by Alexander Limi at October 4, 2006 - 15:52

But you're perfectly free to install FCKEditor if that is what you want.

This PLIP is not about which editor to use. :)

The issue isn't the editor, but the stripping...

Posted by David Groos at October 4, 2006 - 20:00

Thanks for responding. I may well have put this in the wrong place but maybe not. The problem is that when I or my students create a page in plone, make it look the way we want (w/ various font sizes and colors and other visual organization techniques),and save it, much of that formating doesn't shown on the saved page. Is this called 'stripping of tags'?

The reason why it seems that this is the right page to address this issue is the idea of control panels--easy interfaces to control aspects of the site including its look. I first thought that I could take care of the issue of plone stripping off the formating commands when it save the page by going to the kupu control panels and working with the blacklist/whitelist and whatever else I could find, but that didn't work. It was then that I found discussions in the archives showing other people were having this issue. Along with that were comments by plone people that it was purposeful to make it very hard/not possible to have more formatting choices. The reason given was that it went contrary to the spirt of CMS's and having a common look and feel to all of the pages. So, if indeed this isn't a control panel issue or isn't the right kind of control panel issue I'll take it to a better place--let me know. Thanks.

Ability to disable CSS stripping

Posted by Kevin Teague at October 7, 2006 - 09:58

Having recently turned off inline CSS on two Plone sites, I would like to see a control panel like this.

rationalize the skin management

Posted by Yuri at March 7, 2007 - 13:20

there's a lot of confusion on over the skins now and how you customize them. For examples base_properties is general or for each skin? How do you change a skin and how do you just change css?

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