[Freedombox-discuss] updates to plinth

[Sean O'Brien]

Responses, below.

On 03/12/2012 01:47 PM, Mathieu Jourdan wrote:
> Le 10 mars 2012 19:12, Sean O'Brien <me at seandiggity.com> a écrit :
>> I just updated Plinth with a close-to-final version of the default theme.
>>
>> Repo: https://github.com/seandiggity/Plinth
>> Screenshot:
>> https://github.com/seandiggity/Plinth/raw/master/themes/default/screenshot.png
>>
>> ...it's only slightly different than the version I sent around in the
>> past.  Comments welcome.
>>
> 
> Hi Sean,
> 
> Here are a few comments :
> 
> - my girlfriend took briefly a look on it, she said those colours were
> for males.

The current colors are just based on the color of the butterfly logo
(which works well with the default bootstrap CSS).  Plinth was written
with separate themes in mind...things like colors are an easy swap of
CSS.  Admittedly, the current template/theme have too much overlap and
the visual style isn't completely abstracted away from the
"scaffolding", so that's something that I need to address as time goes on.


> - it looks nice !
> - the single-line menu bar is better than the previous one
> - javascript must be enabled to get something useable

The JavaScript thing I thought about when I first started working on
Plinth; I know there's a lot of aversion to JavaScript out there, and
some of it is justified.  However, JavaScript libraries like jQuery are
a great bargain; we get a ton of advanced (and stylish) functionality
for very little work.

It should be easy enough to make a template/theme without JavaScript and
have both available, further down the road.  Plinth also uses JavaScript
to generate the top and side menus, so we'd have to change how that
works as well.

IMO, if this interface is gonna have mainstream appeal, JavaScript will
have to be a part of it.


> - when the alert-info box is empty, I think it should not appear

I have to make some structural changes to the templating system to get
this to work right, but this will definitely be fixed.  Regardless, we
need to fill in more content for those bottom boxes as "tooltips" for
each page.


> - the footer should stick to the bottom of the screen when possible

I disagree; we already have a menu sticking to the top, a footer would
be too much.


> - I like the icons but there are under non-free license :
> http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/

Glyphicons Free is licensed under CC-BY:
http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/base-css.html#icons
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

...they're also closely tied to bootstrap's CSS, so I think they should
stay as long as that's the HTML5 framework we use.


> - to me, everything under "router", "privacy" and "sharing" are
> services, so the later should be replaced with something like
> "identity management"

I will likely put all of those things under the category of "Identity".
 Some of the high-level categories I've thought of are:

Share - Filesharing etc.

Communicate - SIP configuration etc.

Publish - Wiki, blog, whatever you want the world to see (and maybe
others don't want you to post)

Social - Social networking (I think http://newebe.org is a good
candidate for this)

Identity - Privacy config

System - This will have adding/removing/disabling modules under it.

Help - Documentation etc.

^ My plan right now is to treat Plinth's modules as "apps", each falling
into one of those categories (or others if we think of them).


> And one question : is the web browser supposed to be running on the
> plug or a remote computer (e.g, why listening on localhost only)?
> 
> Mathieu

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