[xwiki-devs] [Brainstorming] Improving the Navigation panel

Hi devs, We've had several complaints from users about the Navigation Panel. The 3 big needs that I’ve heard are: 1) Semi-automated by having the ability to blacklist items 2) Better performance ("It’s slow to load and reloads every time you navigate to a new page”) 3) Ability to sort entries See for ex: * https://forum.xwiki.org/t/your-xwiki-usability-pain-points/440/11 * https://jira.xwiki.org/browse/XWIKI-12895 Point 1 ====== That Panel is critical since it’s what users see the most (without navigating anywhere) and it’s important that users be able to customize it (while keeping the automated aspect, e.g. adding a new page should add it to the tree by default as it’s done now). Marius mentioned that adding blacklisting doesn’t make sense because we would then have different behaviors between the Navigation Panel and: • the breadcrumb trees • the page index tree • the location picker tree used on create/copy/rename page • the location picker tree used by the CKEditor link and image dialogs • anywhere we use a tree in XWiki default user interface However I don’t fully agree about this. If you check the Applications Panel, it’s not listing all Apps that exist. It’s only listing Apps that the admin want his/her users to see by default. To see all apps there’s the App Index. Similarly the Navigation Panel on the left should be listing what the admin wants his/her users to see, and going to the Page Index should list all pages. In short I really believe we need to allow customizing the panel with an Admin UI that allows to blacklist some nodes). Does anyone see a better idea to fulfill our user’s needs? Point 2 ====== The main answer I see is to implement the doc title cache so that we don’t have to load documents. Do you see anything else? Point 3 ====== I think this is kind of already implemented with “showDocumentTitle”, right? Thanks -Vincent