[xwiki-devs] [Idea] Reorganizing the Administration section: presentation

Hi devs, There are many things that could be improved in the XWiki Administration, but for the moment I would like to discuss the Presentation part, which is one of those most likely to be accessed by newbies, and should be easy to deal with. Currently, the Presentation allows to configure the following topics: - Header: title bar text and meta information - Panels: whether to show panels on the right/left, and the list of panels to display in each column - Footer: copyright notice and version - Skin: Skin document, Color theme, Default stylesheet, other stylesheets Problems: - IMO, some fields are not really presentation related: title, meta information, copyright notice, version info - It is not easy to list the panels you want without any help or suggestion - The panel columns and panel list configuration feature is also available in a friendlier form in the Panel Wizard section of the administration, but there is no reference to it from the Presentation section - There is no suggestion about available skins, and the user is not "warned" that customizing the skin actually means changing templates and css - "Default stylesheet" and "Other stylesheets" mean nothing to someone who didn't look in the skin directory; also, as I see it, they are only useful for the Toucan skin (where there were several pre-defined stylesheets for different colors), while in the Colibri skin -- and probably the other skins that will be developed from now on -- we use Color themes for changing the look. Proposed changes: - Move Header and Footer topics to the General section - Keep 4 topics: Page layout, Panels, Color theme, Advanced skin configuration, displayed in a horizontal tab bar (like the one in AllDocs) [Page layout] - Use something similar to the Page Layout tab form the wizard to choose if the right/left panels are shown [Panels] - Continue to allow listing the panels in input fields, since for some users it is faster and easier than playing with the panel wizard, but attach an AJAX suggest to those input fields - Display the Panel wizard (and remove the panel wizard section form Administration); Note: the panel wizard will need some adjustments for this to be possible. [Color themes] - Integrate the ColorTheme "application" (or soon to be application): allow browsing, previewing and selecting available color themes, and creating a new color theme [Advanced skin configuration] - Inform the user that he would need to write his own templates and stylesheets, either in the provided textareas or in files attached to the corresponding skin object - Allow to browse, preview and select skins There are many changes, and they will require much more than a couple of days (there won't be time for them to show up in 2.2, for example), but if we agree, they can be progressively integrated in future versions. -- Sergiu Dumitriu http://purl.org/net/sergiu/