[Goodies-dev] Panel plugin UI guidelines

[Diego Ongaro]

I started a page on the wiki for panel plugin UI guidelines [1].
Borrowing from the "Rationale" section:

UI consistency is an important aspect of a mature desktop like Xfce.
On the other hand, there are tons of panel plugins out there,
developed by many different people. A written set of UI guidelines
will help those developers ensure their plugins maintain some basic
level of consistency.

I drafted three very simple guidelines already. For each one of them,
I can think of plugins that don't follow it. Hopefully, these first 3
guidelines have just the right level of controversy to get some
discussion going.

Once a guideline is agreed upon, it should be put into effect for the
core plugins and the major goodies plugins. That raises a couple
questions:
(1) How do we decide when a guideline is agreed upon?
(2) How do we get the guidelines put into effect?

I propose we set up a small team of people who administer guidelines.
Anyone can send a guideline draft to the mailing list for revision.
After the discussion, the administering team can vote (unanimously) on
whether to accept or reject the guideline.

It would then make sense to keep guidelines in a versioned document,
not a public wiki page.

To put the guidelines into effect, we could use some sort of matrix.
We could list the different (core+major) plugins as columns and have
one row per guideline. Each cell would contain a "Implements",
"Doesn't Implement", or "Bug #____". It'd be fine to do this on the
wiki or in subversion.

Your thoughts?

[1] http://wiki.xfce.org/panel-ui-guidelines

-Diego Ongaro