[Goodies-dev] Panel plugin UI guidelines

Diego Ongaro ongardie at gmail.com
Sat Dec 15 20:20:59 CET 2007


On Dec 15, 2007 3:55 AM, Jasper Huijsmans <jasper at xfce.org> wrote:
> 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.

Yes, of course.

> 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.

Yes, true. If we're keeping kind of unofficial, that's fine.

> > 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 think it's important that the core and major plugins implement the
guidelines to set good examples for the rest of them. We can keep
track on this on the wiki page where I have the ??? right now, though.

> [snip]
> 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.

I'll keep that in mind.

-Diego



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