29 Jun
2012
29 Jun
'12
5:23 p.m.
On Fri, Jun 29, 2012 at 5:18 PM, Vincent Massol <vincent(a)massol.net> wrote:
On Jun 29, 2012, at 4:57 PM, Marius Dumitru Florea wrote:
> 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.
It would do the trick but the initial proposal includes a "title", which
wouldn't fit here AFAICT.
JV.
On Fri, Jun 29, 2012 at 4:45 PM, Vincent Massol
<vincent(a)massol.net>
wrote:
>
> 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.
Most of the time the user wants to add a gadget to the dashboard, not
to create one.
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.
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}}.