Forum OpenACS Development: Where to put different forums-ui's ?

Posted by Matthias Melcher on 04/29/05 04:04 PM

There has been a discussion about where to put different
forums-ui's on. I don't want to argue whether this should
be at OpenACS level or at dotLRN level. But I am sure that
UIs should not differ per distribution, which rather should
contain all available UIs, to have the admins preselect from,
and, most importantly, have the end users personally select
from the recommended variants.

Certainly, forum UI's are not one-size-fits-all. However, this
applies not only to applications and institutions but especially
to individuals.

A typical knowledge management or elearning application will
most probably need ALL of the different UI's since the
individual preferences differ not only on group or even site
level.

To quote an arbitrary recent posting about personal productivity,
look at
http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2005/04/25.html#a1123
item #1 "Understand your 'information behaviour'. Some people
like information 'pushed' to them through e-mails. Others
like ..." and
"If you're doing the scan for others in your organization, be
prepared to offer the results in both push and pull 'flavours'."
(D. Pollard)

Also the UAB's recommendations
http://www.rzuser.uni-heidelberg.de/~x28/fspec/
explicitly argued that the choices should be allowed for at
the lowest level possible.

2: Re: Where to put different forums-ui's ? (response to 1)

Posted by Dave Bauer on 05/01/05 06:43 PM

Matthias,

I think there are a couple of issues here

#1 giving users the ability to customize their view of information

#2 flexibility in user interface of forums

Now #1 and #2 could have many components. I think one issue in forums user interface is threaded/vs flat. It does not really make sense to support switching the view per user as it would change the context of the posts in the thread.

I also can't really see an effective use of making _many_ user interfaces available across one .LRN installation. I think one user interface with a couple of options makes sense, but supporting more than one user interface package seems like it will lead to support issues that would have to be carefully considered.

Offering choice to end users is important, but it needs to be balanced, too much choice can just lead to confusion.

3: Re: Where to put different forums-ui's ? (response to 1)

Posted by Matthias Melcher on 05/04/05 05:32 PM

Dave,
I did not say that end users shall do the PREselecting of
UI's on their own, rather, their admin's would do that.
To explain the relationship, I put up a picture here:
http://www.rzuser.uni-heidelberg.de/~x28/fspec/forums.gif

4: Quertion One (response to 1)

Posted by sandeep kumar on 11/24/06 01:33 PM

One