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
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