Descriptive Terminology = "Semantic Intuitiveness"? (was: MODScripts?)

Oh, I’m not saying it’s not logically correct given your reasoning. I just think it just sounds shit when used in a compound phrase and is somewhat counter-intuitive, as a "resource" in common English (not web terminology) is just something you can use. Like water, gunpowder, Ditto.

I’m willing to accept that this is partially due to conditioning having used a MODx that files snippets under Resources. We really do need to clear our mental buffers and run for a few months with a 0.9.5 that harbours snippets under Elements to try and get people used to this. But I must point out that this will be a struggle to non-techies.

Resources has always been the wrong wording in my mind for the various components that make up MODx add-ons.

Here’s a "resource" that shows that there are no less than 9 meanings of Resource - 5 of which are from computer science!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource
The majority of meanings of "resource" would encompass snippets, and not documents. In the semantics of project management, resources are anything definable that is required to carry out a task.

Thankfully, "resources" will be mostly transparent to my clients.

I don’t want the concept to be masked with improper semantics.

I am afraid that many of your concepts need to be masked by something, whether they are improper semantics or not. Obviously the ideal is that it makes perfect sense and correlates with the actual code, but computing metaphors are not always semantically correct. They work best when they are not going to be confused with something else.

It would have been helpful if you’d told us how inflexible you were going to be earlier; we’re hours away from releasing 0.9.5 RC2 using this terminology, and I don’t know how long it is until 0.9.7.

Clearly, what we need to be doing is thrashing out the path to 1.0, working out what the 1.0 Manager will look like, and working out how best to introduce the new concepts.

I’m sorry, major corporate marketspeak notwithstanding, there is nothing "intuitive" about computers or anything to do with them. As is often said, the only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. Anything else must be learned.

That said, I agree with the "resources" and "elements" terminology. We are dealing with the Web, and Web "resources" are pages, streams, etc accessed by Uniform Resource Locators. So it makes sense to maintain continuity with our main purpose, which is to provide resources to be located in a uniform manner.

Edit : Ooops took some time to type this message and Susan already underlined the web resources thing and URLs... Sorry for redundant content

About that Resources bit, I think even if the term has many different meaning the one which fits on the wikipedia page you mention is the web acceptation for resources (Jason talked about "virtual web resources" and it helped). Which sounds a bit more understandable. I mean, the thing that made it click for me when I read Jason’s post on the Rethinking MODx thread is its ties to the concept of Uniform Resource Locator (and also the mention of Resource Description Framework and Dublin Core).

Anyway, I think until things become less abstract for us (meaning starting to experiment with the new core) it’s going to be hard to "clear our mental buffer" as you say. I really do think we have to negociate the upcoming turn, since it’s not going to be a small curb, so to speak. I don’t know how much of the 1.0 codebase will be in 0.9.7, but it sure would be nice to get started on that once 0.9.5 is released.

I am not sure wether a 0.9.5 + New parser is still planned as 0.9.6 in the meantime or not. Guess it wouldn’t be such a bad idea... Anyway, cleaning out the "Resources" term from the manager menu is one important thing, but there will be many steps to go through to make the transition more progressive to 1.0. We’re starting to have a nice user base, not to mention a great coder’s base and we wouldn’t want to loose anyone along the way.