29 Jun
2012
29 Jun
'12
5:24 p.m.
On Fri, Jun 29, 2012 at 6:18 PM, Vincent Massol <vincent(a)massol.net> wrote:
On Jun 29, 2012, at 4:57 PM, Marius Dumitru Florea wrote:
On Fri, Jun 29, 2012 at 4:45 PM, Vincent Massol
<vincent(a)massol.net> wrote:
Indeed, good point.
It's not the case here but it's probably the major use case, even though we
don't yet have any real gadget to use… Macros are not really Gadgets. Macros are
reusable building blocks while gadgets are supposed to do something specific display stuff
nicely,etc. We have a few macros that can act as gadgets like the {{document}} macro or
{{activity}} for ex.
We discussed in the past having a "Gadget" content type but we didn't
conclude and it's a bit awkward.
The problem right now is that users get to see all macros that exist, even complex and
technical ones rather than see upfront a selected list of nice macro/gadget to use for a
dashboard.
On Jun 29, 2012, at 3:32 PM, Guillaume Lerouge wrote:
Hi Caty,
On Fri, Jun 29, 2012 at 3:10 PM, Vincent Massol <vincent(a)massol.net> wrote:
>
> On Jun 29, 2012, at 3:00 PM, Ecaterina Moraru (Valica) wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I have received numerous complains that simple users have problems in
>> editing the content and title of the Welcome block ("Welcome to you
wiki"
>> gadget) from the homepage.
>> There are multiple factors that influence the editing of that particular
>> gadget and that make the job especially harder for beginners.
>>
>> One of these factors is that the gadget used to display the Welcome
> content
>> is an "include" gadget. Without some custom actions for the gadget
that
>> would let the user navigate to the included page or without some
>> auto-redirect mechanism, the simple users have difficulties in
>> understanding where the welcome content is coming from and what actions
>> they need to do in order to edit that content.
>> Also the "include" macro has a lot of advanced properties that can be
> scary
>> and confusing for users (context, reference, section, type, etc.).
>>
>> My proposal is to create a new "text" gadget. This gadget will be
> very-very
>> simple and will contain just the gadget's title and the gadget's
content.
>> Its only purpose will be to let users add textual information inside a
>> dashboard.
>>
>
http://incubator.myxwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Improvements/EditingWelcomeMess…
>
I was thinking about the exact same idea after doing a demo yesterday :-)
>> Right now we have specialized gadgets for HTML content, velocity content,
>> code in general, boxes, success messages, etc. but no way to put just a
>> simple text inside the dashboard.
>
> Indeed when editing the dashboard we should be able to not use a gadget
> and instead type directly the content in wysiwyg mode.
>
> I don't think we should have a "text" macro though.
>
It's the fastest way to solve the issue at hand, with the lowest overhead.
Caty, you could even offer it right away as an extension on
extensions.xwiki.org , you simply need to create a wiki macro. We could
call it "gadget text" if that makes you feel better.
One idea is that the Add gadget button should open a custom Gadget dialog
> box that allows to specify the title and for the content it should display
> the WYSIWYG editor, thus allowing to insert macros like for any content.
>
This means changing the existing dashboard architecture which is going to
take ages, with nobody assigned to it right now. Caty's solution is both
faster and simpler.
I'm +1!
IMO the strategy should always be the same (whatever the topic):
1) Agree about where we want to go
2) Decide how to get there
3) Possibly decide about creating temporary technical debt because 1) would take too long
and the feature/issue is needed quickly
What's wrong is to jump to 3) without thinking about 1) because:
* you may be making incompatible choices
* it's very very difficult to remove something
* 1) might not be that hard
Also having that macro on e.x.o is not going to help at all. No users is going to look
for it and install it before editing his/her dashboard.
IMO what's not nice is how we hijacked the Macro editor. It makes it unnecessarily
complex for the user.
If instead we present the user with the standard WYSIWYG editor and the same ability as
he already knows about to add content it'll be much more effective.
It shouldn't be complex since we already have
all the pieces. Since I've not been close to this code I'm curious to get feedback
from Anca and Marius about the idea and the time it would take to achieve it.
Most of the time the user wants to add a gadget to the dashboard, not
to create one. And 'add' implies selecting a gadget from
a list. I'm
not sure that displaying a WYSIWYG editor (rich text area) when
clicking the "Add Gadget" will make things more clear. The user will
probably ask herself "What now?". Is she going to know that a 'gadget'
is a macro?
Yes you're right. This is more a use case for creating a new widget.
BTW right now we cannot edit a gadget that doesn't use a macro as its top content.
You get an error popup when you try this, telling you to use the object editor. At some
point it would be nice to fix this.
Keeping the list of gadgets and having a special
one whose
content is editable with the WYSIWYG editor seems to me as the best
solution. Now, displaying the WYSIWYG editor for the content of this
special gadget might require some hacks.
Yes. It's the same topic as the "macro-specific editor" topic, which is a
complex one.
Just got an idea. What I didn't like was to have a {{text}} macro that has no meaning
when used outside of the dashboard but I think we can reconcile the best of both worlds
since there's a macro we've been wanting to have for some time to allow to write
markup in any markup language.
So we could call it {{content}} and it could have an
optional parameter called "syntax" to specify the syntax of its content; if not
specified it would default to the syntax of the current doc in which it is put.
So full form would be {{content syntax="xwiki/2.1"}}….{{/content}}.
WDYT?
Indeed, such a macro could be useful, +1
Thanks,
Marius
Thanks
-Vincent
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