22 Jul
2013
22 Jul
'13
9:16 p.m.
On 07/20/2013 07:33 AM, Vincent Massol wrote:
Hi devs,
In the Roadmap proposal I've sent for XWiki 5.2 some days ago, there's this
time:
"
* Have Workspace by default in XE + improved home page - Caty + Guillaume Delhumeau. FTR
Guillaume is not a committer yet but he's going to work full time on XWiki development
and especially on UI aspects from now on. Welcome aboard Guillaume, we need you! :)
"
Denis told me he didn't know about the proposal of having Workspaces integrated in
the default XAR. Thus I'm sending this email to ensure we all agree about this.
The rationale is:
* It would be nice that when our users download XWiki (standalone version or install the
default XAR) they get to see the power of XWiki. One of the very important differentiator
of XWiki vs other wikis/solutions is our multi-tenancy feature and most of people
downloading and installing XWiki don't see it.
* XEM/Wiki Manager are lacking polishing because the committers mostly polish the default
which doesn't include those. The UIs of XEM/Wiki Manager need polishing. Having them
in default will ensure that we take them into account and make them first class citizens
when we develop.
Caty started working on the home page/UI improvements required to integrate this by
default:
http://incubator.myxwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Improvements/MultiWiki
Here's my +1
This is a major shift in how first-time users perceive XWiki. Without
multi-wiki features, it still looks like a wiki, but if the homepage
changes from a "welcome to your wiki" page to a "here are your
workspaces" portal, then suddenly XWiki "becomes" something else in the
eyes of our users. I used quotes since nothing changes on the inside,
the multiwiki feature has been there since the beginning, and the single
wiki mode can still be used.
But this change in how XWiki is perceived has both advantages and
disadvantages. On one hand, it clearly shows users that XWiki is a
collaborative platform, not just a wiki, so people that need
collaboration more than just a wiki will be able to see that XWiki isn't
another boring wiki. On the other hand, people that are just looking for
a wiki that's nice to use and "not-ugly", might be put off by yet
another layer of complexity, and might drop XWiki from their list of
candidates. In other words, it alienates even more the kind of users
that already perceive XWiki as hard to use and overly complex.
So, are we willing to trade one type of users for the other? It would be
in line with our vision of "enterprise collaboration", but I still think
we shouldn't voluntarily alienate any kind of users.
An alternative is to wait for a real flavor, and then ask in the first
step of the distribution manager what kind of usage do we want. In the
meantime, we can still polish the pages that will go in the "workspaces"
flavor.
So, -0 for switching to "workspaces only" in 5.2, unless we have really
good backwards compatibility and a flavor for a simple wiki for textual
collaboration.
--
Sergiu Dumitriu
http://purl.org/net/sergiu