Position of UserForm in Main web

In DEVELOP (3844) in templates dir there is currently a subdir Main. The view.pattern.tmpl places the form with user data at the top:

In case you were wondering, this template is different in that it inverts the form to be above the text facilitating the use of the form as structured data entry for data fields about the user.

Who can tell something about this?

-- ArthurClemens - 23 Mar 2005

Martin can. He did it because it is more user-oriented, especially when all user data is in the form.

-- CrawfordCurrie - 23 Mar 2005

Martin, how would the user edit the data in the view template?

-- ArthurClemens - 23 Mar 2005

"Click on 'edit'"

No, really.

Normally forms appear at the bottom of the topic, all Martin has done is make it apear at the top. Looking at the code he seems to have had a design in mind where the user information, inclduing some pictures, were at the top.

By putting this data in the form it is now metadata and so is "indexable", and can be used by other facilties such as the BulkResetPassword.

Forms are normally edited at the bottom of the edit screen.

My personal reservation about this is that its ther even if there are other forms chosen. A user might delete that form, put his personal information in as the "bullet list" format from Cairo, and use some other form. That form will now appear at the top, which may not be appropriate.

I see no simple resolution to this.

-- AntonAylward - 23 Mar 2005

The use of the form for the structured data was to provide field entry dialogues where only values should be changed. This means that the user can be confident about what text they can change and moreover to ensure that nothing the user can do will break SEARCHES that collate records into aggregated form (e.g. tables).

If you look at http://wiki.conceptmapping.org/view/People/UserList you will see the list of registered users, http://wiki.conceptmapping.org/view/People/UserList?raw=on shows this is a search. On another site (behind a firewall) I aggregated bullet fields but this was severely messed up when people removed, reordered or reformatted their home pages. Hence a form puts a straightjacket where one is needed.

That the user could change a form shouldn't concern us - the administrator has the rights to mandate what forms can be used. We ought only be concerned about formalising the People web in place of Main... Main might require other forms, but users ought not be able to change their home topics to use them.

It was a judgement call about whether to put the userform at the top of the page. I think it looks better but it is easy to change on a per-site basis so I am happy to go with whatever people want.

For an example of what a topic should almost look like, see http://wiki.conceptmapping.org/People/LilianHill - the only thing broken is that there is no ImageGalleryPlugin on the site as I am waiting for a secure new release.

-- MartinCleaver - 24 Mar 2005

No question about the use of a form for the user data.

What I am still wondering about is the "data entry" aspect, because now it is a non-editable table. Also the position of the table: it is really really at the top, even a topic title would go below it, and it doesn't make a nice page introduction. That makes me wondering why the table shouldn't be at the bottom.

-- ArthurClemens - 24 Mar 2005

at first blush i'd expect it to be consistent with the other webforms, and if the user wants to be different (as you obviously want to be Martin), then it is, as you say easy to change it.

-- SvenDowideit - 24 Mar 2005

Good point about the topic title, Arthur, but as for the rest ..

This is the "up front' information about the user, name, e-mail, and when the image gallery is working, the photograph. NOT putting that at in a position wher it occupied the upper part of the page, that is, it is the first thing visible on opening the topic, would be counter productive. Putting the form at the botton where forms normally go would cause more compaints.

You have access to your templates, turn it off and see how it looks.

As for it being ugly - lets not mince words, its ugly, that's another matter. On my site there is potentailly a LOT of user data, and having all that as an empty form is extremely ugly. But surely some of this uglyness this is a CSS matter ...

As for it not being editable. I don't get your point. It is editable, just like any other form. Perhpas you have problems with the ALLOWTOPICCHNAGE setting.

Now if you are saying that the edit area doens't apear in the same place as it appears to be when viewing the topic .... that's another matter.

-- AntonAylward - 24 Mar 2005

My point about "editable" is that this was presented as an argument why it should be at the top: facilitating the use of the form as structured data entry

But the other argument is more compelling: you should have an immediate overview of the person's data. So the form should be placed somewhere at the top.

Ugliness: if we put it inside a div, it would be easy to style it differently from the normal bottom form.

Could we use a special user template perhaps, so that other forms in the Main web are placed at the bottom?

Still it would be nice if you first have a page title, then the form below it.

-- ArthurClemens - 24 Mar 2005

Could we use a special user template perhaps, so that other forms in the Main web are placed at the bottom?

Is that necessary if you separate people into their own web?

-- MartinCleaver - 24 Mar 2005

Only if you also have other pages in that web that use a WebForm.

-- ArthurClemens - 24 Mar 2005

Do you mean non-people pages? Why would you have a non-people related pages in a People web?

-- MartinCleaver - 24 Mar 2005

Oh things like WebPreferences, WebIndex, UserListByFirstname, WebLeftBar, WebNotify, WebSearch I suppose.

Now the fact that YOU may have no reason to put a WebForm in one of those doens't mean that other people might not want to.

I suspect there may be other problems with a People web as well as a Main web. What will %MAINWEB% evaluate to when you have the signatures?

-- AntonAylward - 25 Mar 2005

Perhaps we could use SpreadSheetPlugin to check for a variable that is only in user templates, and position the form accordingly.

-- ArthurClemens - 25 Mar 2005

NO! No way! I disable SpreadSheetPlugin in most of my installs; it should not be required for basic functionality!

We really need that %TMPL:IF{}% support, don't we?

-- CrawfordCurrie - 25 Mar 2005

So there is no other way to have conditionals in the template?

I also find it difficult that the template Main/view.pattern.tmpl cannot override view.pattern.tmpl. Now we have to maintain 2 templates. Which would be unnecessary if we had a conditional, but still.

-- ArthurClemens - 25 Mar 2005

I know! Let's build a replacement for TemplateToolkit

-- MartinCleaver - 25 Mar 2005

Right, let's not redo the discussion from BetterTemplateSystem. Better first check out PatternSkinUsingTT2Templates as well.

-- ArthurClemens - 25 Mar 2005

Actually, Arthur has already touched on somethng similar in ClassificationDrivenPageLayout

-- AntonAylward - 26 Mar 2005

Actually, it was Martin who has brought up the whole layout of the page should too change with a Page Type change.

Using TWIKILAYOUTURL you would be able to change layout positions with css.

But first a "page type" variable should get linked to TWIKILAYOUTURL. And user pages should be somehow typed differently from other pages.

-- ArthurClemens - 26 Mar 2005

I would like to see the UserForm go to the bottom of the page. It is not consistent with the rest of the webs, and I think it really should be (Forms are confusing enough to new users as they are, I'd hate to mess things up further, introducing the position as a parameter also :-)).

I believe there is no problem in placing a few bullets on the top of the user topic, perhaps stating "First Name", "Last Name" and "Email" and simply making them a search that searches in the current topic only. A "topic end"-jump could be added nearby, perhaps labelled All user details or similar, jumping to the form.

Another reason is of course minimizing redundant code - as of now (SVN 4365) the Main view template is already lagging considerably behind the general one (i.e. using the deprecated "Edit" link in the bottom bar), so I think that's just another good reason for not having extra sets of templates.

At our workplace we changed to using forms for userdata long ago - and many people have their topic text empty now (except for email and preferences settings which are often hidden in HTML comment tags) - so I agree on the concept of using forms for user information fully.

BTW: Any reason the comment field didn't make it to the form? Would like to see it go there as well, easier for searches etc.

-- SteffenPoulsen - 09 Jun 2005

I didn't put the comment field into the form as I wanted to allow people to use the text of the topic as a free form edit space.

If you eliminate the TextPad space altogether then your form is at the top.

Why do you want to put the bullet points back into the topic? I am trying to avoid putting tags into the topics as the home topic should be the first thing that people edit and many non-technical people find them off-putting.

The deprecated Edit tag is a good point. Ideally we should have a means to move the definitions into a central file so they are not repeated; I am not familiar with the mechanisms so I have just recopied the default view.pattern.tmpl to Main/view.pattern.tmpl; this is in SVN 4373.

Has your workplace implemented further useful applications based on users? vCard is screaming out to be done: it would be a straightforward job.

-- MartinCleaver - 11 Jun 2005

About vCard: perhaps Technorati's hCard is useful.

-- ArthurClemens - 11 Jun 2005

On the issue of topic specific layout... in DakarRelease we now have implemented a feature to give a topic a specific template based on a tag in the topic (which need not be visible in the topic, using another new DakarRelease feature...

This is more flexible and much faster than using topic specific CSS, as is discussed above.

-- ThomasWeigert - 12 Jun 2005

Ah, true. You are quite right, thanks.

I'll see if I can figure that out.

-- MartinCleaver - 12 Jun 2005

As the above discussion made quite clear the current user topic is not satisfactory.

• The form on top wastes much space, in particular when it is empty.
• When editing, suddenly the form is on the bottom.
• All other topics in Main will also have their form on top.

The have our cake and eat it two, I have implemented a custom form for user topics. Using this feature:

• The form is on top only for user topics
• The editing of the user data in the form is done with a link just below the form.
• The form displays in two-column format to save space

I was not sure about the "My info" title, but I did not want to repeat the users name up there. Alternatively, we could have no title, but it somehow sets what is below off better.

In SVN 4576.

Comments?

-- ThomasWeigert - 11 Jul 2005

It is possible that people on other pages need other forms than the user form. The position of the user form at the top is only useful for the user pages.

So the challenge is: can we have the user form at the top in the user pages only and other forms at the normal position?

The 2 column design is good. Instead of putting the information left <-> right, I would put all 'address' items vertically in one coloumn, other items in the other column. Something like this?

-- ArthurClemens - 11 Jul 2005

Arthur, this new update is only in the user topics (and actually, each individual user can change this if she does not like it). All other topics have the standard form position.

-- ThomasWeigert - 11 Jul 2005

What about this: Make all the field in the User form hidden, and build a table at the begining of the page filling it with Select one... tags (It works in DakarRelease), and put a link in that table to edit just the form (pass

action=form

This way:

1. The table at the top could have any layout
2. When editing the User info, only the User info is shown for modification (easier to grok by new users)
3. Searchs for users can be made on the meta fields, as the pattern is more standard and lessen the risk of the user changing the text of the page making the search fail.

-- RafaelAlvarez - 11 Jul 2005

Supporting Rafaels proposal. I did this by using a template topic (holding the table that presents the user info) that gets included in each users home topic (instead of using the ugly form at top approach). There has been only a problem with the email-settings (for notification purposes). How will the notification mechanism in Dakar resolve email-addresses from the users hometopics?

-- FranzJosefSilli - 11 Jul 2005

Hmmm... I thought I was so clever, but in reality...

• I have used the VIEW_TEMPLATE preference to change the template for the user topic.
• But the user topic sets preferences for this user system-wide.
• Therefore, this template applies to every topic, not just the user topic.

Need to come up with plan B....

-- ThomasWeigert - 11 Jul 2005

Went back and came up with Plan B. This is now implemented in SVN 5999.

-- ThomasWeigert - 05 Aug 2005