[Goodies-dev] Panel plugin UI guidelines

[Jasper Huijsmans]

Hey Diego,

This is a great idea. I´m afraid I don have much (read: any) time to
work on Xfce at the moment, so I can´t be of much help. But it is good
to have some guidelines for plugins.

2007/12/14, Diego Ongaro <ongardie at gmail.com>:
>
> 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?
>

First of all, I would suggest that it is emphasized somewhere in the
text that these are guidelines not laws and ultimately the plugin
author can decide to do things differently.

Secondly, guidelines can probably be agreed upon by consensus between
a couple of plugin writers and maybe a panel maintainer (me or Nick).

> I propose we set up a small team of people who administer guidelines.

I propose you do that, with as many people you choose to help you out
(that´s what you get for volunteering ;-)

> 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.

I think a wiki should be fine, really. Wikis are good for collaborative writing.

>
> 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.
>

I not sure this is important to keep track of this, or to make them
formal bugs. Maybe patches with a link to the guideline are enough?

I would be careful not to put too much process into this effort. A
more or less agreed upon list of guidelines would already be a very
good achievement.

> Your thoughts?

Thanks for doing this!

By the way, it has always been my goal to help plugin consistency by
providing commonly used widgets in libxfce4panel, so feel free to send
patches for additional widgets, beside buttons. That is probably the
easiest way to ensure consistency.

-- 
        Jasper