[TYPO3-hci] BE vs FE

[Waldemar Kornewald]

Hi Christopher and Michael,
I was mentioning "*simple* every-day tasks" multiple times and you
reply to my MS Office example with "users don't use all
functionality". Here we agree, but we're talking about different
things. What I wanted to say is that trial-and-error works for simple
use-cases and most end-users only need those simple use-cases.

Could we please start anew and you just forget my other suggestions. I
doubt that you will accept any of my suggestions because you always
remember my too radical suggestions.

On 8/2/06, Christopher <bedlamhotelnospam at gnospammail.com> wrote:
> There is nothing about the BE/FE distinction _per se_ that prevents the
> development of community sites as you keep claiming--I'm sure you've
> misunderstood what people have been saying.

I just prefer if this is possible out-of-the-box. Customizations are
very time-consuming.

> Forgive me for making the assumption, but I can't believe, given what
> you keep insisting about training, that you have much experience with
> end-users. We use many different CMS products on client websites
> (according to their needs and requests), and we /know/, from long
> experience that /all clients need CMS training/. This is true for
> Mambo/Joomla, Drupal, Plone, Xaraya, some fairly ugly proprietary
> systems we've been forced to work with /and/ it's true for TYPO3. In my
> experience, clients have better luck solving their own problems with the
> relatively consistent TYPO3 BE than they do with any of these other
> products. In all honesty, I suspect it's because TYPO3 has one of the
> more well thought out concepts: Site contains pages, pages contain
> content elements etc.

I agree that TYPO3 has the better concept when compared to Mambo,
Drupal, and Xaraya (otherwise we'd be using those systems).

You seem to misunderstand me. I think that the UI could be more
intuitive, so newbies can do *simple* (!) tasks without training. At
least our users don't have to do any advanced stuff: creating
text+image pages, uploading files, posting news and blog items.
Anything else is reserved for the site admins.

> In any case, the point is, in answer to a question of yours elsewhere in
> this thread, that I don't believe in the possibility of a product
> useable without training, even for the basics, because I have never seen
> /any/ CMS tool--or /any/ software--that even approaches this paradigm.

In your opinion Plone is not approaching it? I mean, creating a news
item is as easy as clicking "Add" -> "News Item". Creating a page is
as easy as clicking "Add" -> "Page". Plone isn't perfect, but it does
make very basic tasks doable without training. Esp. because the
buttons (including their placement) are self-explanatory.

> As far as a trial and error approach is concerned, I think if you were
> given a /properly configured/ BE to play with, you'd find you were able
> to create pages and contents in about 15 minutes.

Right, but why is the BE not properly configured, by default?

> And with respect to MS products, surely you don't really believe that
> anybody uses any tiny fraction of Excel's capabilities without training?
> I'd be willing to bet that the single most common use of Excel by
> untrained persons is as a /database/. Certainly hardly anyone uses Excel
> in any remotely effective way without fairly detailed training.

Like I said above, I talked about *simple* (!) tasks. Anything beyond
that of course requires some kind of training/learning. The point is
that for many users there is *no need* for more.

> TYPO3 is a framework targeted at /developers/ and their /clients/.

Maybe that's the problem with my previous suggestions. So, what about
me only making suggestions about how to improve the interface without
doing any radical changes? Andreas Balzar already posted a nice mockup
for a new BE which wouldn't introduce too radical changes, but still
make everything more intuitive.
Or, what do you think about the problem that the left column in the BE
affects the right column (instead of the middle column)? Shouldn't
those page buttons be converted to tabs and moved to the right column?

> For the needs of developers...well you've already noticed TYPO3's
> millions of options. These are a) present, and b) enabled by default
> because /it is not possible--or at least it's anything but easy--to come
> up with a less general solution to the problem/.

Okay, let's skip the problem of finding a new solution and just
concentrate on the problems of the current UI. What do you think about
my other suggestions? Can we talk about that?
And which is the official place to collect those suggestions? I found
a few wiki pages but I wasn't sure if that is the right place because
they didn't list a lot of entries.

Bye,
Waldemar Kornewald