openerp-community team mailing list archive

[Niels Huylebroeck <nh@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

We've been writing some modules here that most of our customers seem to
enjoy. It ranges from changes such as showing customer references on the
picking and invoices (also being able to search on them immediately) and
other such trivial changes.

Up until now most of these changes we've been doing via the customization
approach (ie: create view records in a database without using xml in a
module). This has (as you all probably now) the advantage that any
updates/upgrades/removals/migrations of other modules will not affect these
views. At the same time this is it's drawback, any changes on the inherited
view can break and it's hard to maintain.

When the community reviewer process and associated branches were birthed
one of the agreed policies was that we avoid very minimal modules that do
such simple tweaks. This mainly to avoid having a cluster of modules that
are very tiny, hardly documented and relatively hard to run automated tests
on.

I would like to gather opinions and start a discussion on how we can
organize such usability features in an open fashion as we have been doing
with larger scoped modules.

To start off with I would like to suggest that we create a configuration
module to install said individual tweaks. We can use a similar way that
OpenERP is using with the configuration to mask the individual module
names. I would suggest we bundle the tweaks in a general fashion in the
same way the top level menu's are organized
(accounting/sale/stock/purchase/...).

Visually we could perhaps even include small screenshots inside this
configuration module to highlight which tweak changes which view
(before/after). These would have to be supplied by the tweak module authors
themselves (but would be contained inside the configuration module itself).

Another important thing to keep in mind in this configuration module is
that we want to minimize dependencies AND make sure that installing a tweak
module will not install any dependencies. This means that any option to
turn on a tweak module would have to ensure it's dependencies were already
installed or that the user is notified very clearly which dependencies it
will install.


TL;DR: think of a way to gather small usability tweaks in a way that can be
grasped by end-users


Regards
-- 
Niels Huylebroeck
Lead Architect   --   Agaplan
Tel. : +32 (0) 93 95 98 90
Web : http://www.agaplan.eu