Forum OpenACS Development: Re: Making OpenACS useful out of the box

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Posted by Eric Wolfram on
I looked at that UI and here are some general thoughts:

* logger -- time tracker -- excellent application that I used extensively in 3.2.5 version of ACS. I like the new expenses part. I'm really happy to see it again -- thank you. One thing that I always thought would be cool, is a button that I could push which would tell me how much time goes by until I push it again. That way, when a client calls, I would push the button and when I hung up I could push it again and it would ask me the project and for a comment and then log how much time went by. (I'm not sure if that is even possible in HTML.) Also, I like the 3.2.5 calendar view very much -- it was excellent UI for logging time at the end of the day (and to see weekly totals) -- and the reporting features were very handy.

* tables
I still use tables and I would like to understand how to use div tags to do layout better. Any examples in the openACS CVS yet? Any pointers to good docs?

* tabs
Tabs are good in some instances, usually within an application. From my experience in building web sites, I find that global navigation is limiting. I might be missing something, but why use tabs here? Can a user limit the use of tabs here easily, or decide which tabs should appear? Sites that use the / page as the true index page with context sensitive navigation and no global navigation are the most flexible and scalible.

* customer database
I used that in 3.2.5 and I entered more then 150 customers plus ample correspondence. That application alone could motivate many small businesses to adopt openACS (which, presumably, would be good for all involved.) The ideal situation would be to integrate that application with webmail and provide import/export from palm, Act and Salesforce. Salesforce just upped their rate. That's their business model -- get people hooked and then up their rate. I bet if OpenACS had even a basic version, we could get small businesses to switch to OpenACS for that application alone. If I ever get up to speed on coding I'd like to help out, but I don't think I could get very far at this point. But I am willing to talk about it 😊

Okay, with that I'll say -- thank you and "Keep up the excellent work" -- these are just some thoughts and no big deal.