23 Nov
2015
23 Nov
'15
4:43 p.m.
Hi Guillaume,
See below.
On 23 Nov 2015 at 15:30:09, Guillaume Lerouge
(guillaume@xwiki.com(mailto:guillaume@xwiki.com)) wrote:
Hi Devs,
first of all I'd like to congratulate everyone who worked on the latest 7.x
releases. I tried a 7.4 snapshot locally and it's looking great! The
interface feels much simpler and fresher overall, well done!
Thanks, glad you like it.
Nested spaces bring about a significant change in the
way information is
stored and organized in XWiki. They make it less necessary to create
sub-wikis to compartmentalise information.
Besides, at the moment a sub-wiki is almost exactly the same as the main
wiki upon creation. I've been doing plenty of demos of XWiki 7.4 at a
conference last week and it was difficult to explain the difference between
the main wiki and a sub-wiki.
Therefore, I would like to suggest the following changes:
1. *View the main wiki as a collaborative content repository* (what a
wiki is most often associated with). Therefore the main wiki would have the
most wiki-like features (treeview and tagcloud in a pane on the left) and
global activity stream on the home page. Users looking for a "simple" wiki
wouldn't even need to create sub-wikis.
2. *View subwikis as collaborative workspaces* (created for a project or
another type of shorter-lived initiative). A subwiki would retain the
appbar on the left, as well as panels on the right that are specific to
each app (ex: forum app, blog app...). The homepage would be made of
widgets surfacing information from the various apps installed. Additional
subwiki templates could be added later on, once flavors are built into the
product.
3. *Add the horizontal menu to the standard install.* In addition to
this, an entry should be added to the menu to automatically list existing
sub-wikis the user has access to. This would make navigation between wikis
more discoverable and easier to use.
Related to this, we’re already planning this:
http://jira.xwiki.org/browse/XWIKI-12538#
My feeling is that these changes would make the
distinction between nested
spaces and sub-wikis much easier to explain and understand for users:
- *Want to share generic information? Put it in the right location in
the main wiki.*
- *Want to work with others on a restricted project? Create a sub-wiki
for this purpose.*
With the addition of the horizontal menu, the main wiki would act as both a
portal to information and a knowledge repository.
Looking forward to your feedback,
I think you’re entering into flavors here. There are plenty of various needs and you’re
listing one. There are others, such as using XWiki for a farm (just to list one).
That’s exactly why we’ve started developing the notion of flavors btw.
So far, what we’ve agreed not long ago was to say that the XWiki project should focus on
offering a generic platform with a generic default flavor. And to leave it to the
community to offer flavors on extensions.xwiki.org and those flavors would appear then
first time you install XWiki or create a subwiki.
In conclusion I don’t see how points 1, 2 or 3 could be integrated in a default platform
flavor because they really look specific. I personally wouldn't 3 by default since our
goal was to unclutter XWiki and the menu would add back clutter and I don’t think that all
flavors require such an horizontal menu.
Regarding the differences between spaces and wikis, we have this thread listing the
differences:
http://markmail.org/message/qcjnev4qkhvjivj2
This led to http://design.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Proposal/WikivsNestedSpaces which we
should move to the doc proper. I’ll try to do this in the coming days.
Thanks
-Vincent
Guillaume