[Kss-devel] drag and drop in Plone 3.0

[Balazs Ree]

Hi Sam,

ON Thu, 21 Jun 2007 03:48:48 +0000 Sam Stainsby wrote:

> Not sure if this should be kss.devel or plone.devel. Let me know if
> inappropriate.

I believe it is perfectly appropriate here.
 
> I'm trying to add some KSS drag and drop mechanisms in Plone 3.0 beta 3
> for a new multimedia database project that has some decent funding
> behind it. I have looked at KSS and kss.demo and decided the overall its
> pretty damn good and I'm excited at the prospect of working with it and
> adding new plugins and helping to develop anything else that needs to be
> done.

Bad news is that drag-and-drop kss support will not be by default 
included in Plone 3.0 release. It is too late for that already and we had 
to opt for other priorities.

Good news is that I have a new branch with entirely enhanced support 
based on the prototype / scriptaculous drag-and-drop code. I will commit 
that code in a branch soon. This will be usable in Plone 3.0 however with 
a few caveats.

The main problem seems to be that the scriptaculous javascript code that 
we reuse, does not support more independent "sortable" (or draggable, 
droppable) pools in one page. The data structures are all a singleton. 
This will cause a big problem because you won't be able to, for example, 
allow portlets to be rearranged at the same time, plus have another 
component do its own drag-and-drop business for say, a shopping cart. 
However: while this is a major headache for Plone in general, it may be 
acceptable if you want to use it in your custom application and you are 
in full control of everything that happens.

What's more: to get rid of this limitation in scriptaculous, we would 
need to copypaste and duplicate its code. In the end we would arrive to 
forking the codebase which we find unacceptable. We will look for other 
possibilities though.

Another problem is that although I am ready to check in this branch to 
the svn, I have not made the demos yet that explain its usage, and I am 
also not likely to have time to write them soon. My time is very limited 
in this respect but I will see what I can do.

I will announce the checkin of the branch on the list. This code is 
stable in the sense that it is already running in production. It would be 
great if you could test it too.

-- 
Balazs Ree