3 May
2018
3 May
'18
12:18 p.m.
On Wed, May 2, 2018 at 7:18 PM, Vincent Massol <vincent(a)massol.net> wrote:
Hi Marius,
Thanks for working on this.
Some general remarks/ideas.
* I believe we need to satisfy **all** the following generic use cases
(with the whitelist taking precedence for example):
** Be able for the admin user to black list some nodes and children
** Be able for the admin user to white list some nodes and children
I haven't seen any user requests for these *generic* use cases. What I've
seen are requests for removing from the tree *top level pages* that belong
to applications:
-----
https://forum.xwiki.org/t/release-notes-how-to-remove-it-from-navigation/494
"I have installed the cool application of “Release Notes” but I would like
to have access to my Release Notes only by the Application panel and not by
the Navigation menu."
http://jira.xwiki.org/browse/XWIKI-12895
"This could be a field where one specifies a list of root nodes (more than
one) than one would like to exclude."
"The example discussed yesterday was about removing the "XWiki" space from
the list (not really "content" from an end user perspective), the
"Main"
space (e.g. if used together with the showRoot="true" people are confused
why they expand the "Home" link on the wiki and get another "Home"
link
inside pointing to the same page), and the "Sandbox" (as it is a
playground, and not "real content" - a wiki owner might decide that
"Sandbox" will linked from a separate panel, and should not be mixed with
the "actual, serious content"). Another example is the "MoccaCalendar"
that
people might not want to see in the tree because it is already in the
applications panel."
"I'm looking for something like this:
#set ($blacklistedSpaces = ['Main', 'AnnotationCode',
'ColorThemes',
'XWiki', 'Panels', 'Scheduler', 'Stats',
'AppWithinMinutes', 'Blog',
'Space1', 'Space2', 'Space3', 'Space4', 'Macros',
'Space5', 'Space6',
'Space7'])"
-----
Which can be translated to:
* Exclude from the navigation panel top level pages that correspond to
applications accessible from the application panel
* Exclude from the navigation panel application pages (non user content)
The problem is at the *top level* because at the top level there are pages
that the administrator doesn't "own" (cannot rename or delete safely).
* When the admin defines the black list and white list
in the Admin UI, I
agree that one whitelist filter he could add is the “Don’t show top level
application pages”. However for me this is just one filter among several
that he should be able to add. In other words he could choose this white
list + some manual ones. I even agree that this whitelist could be turned
on by default.
I see where you go with this but I find it overly complicated.
* I don’t see how solution 4 alone would solve the
“XWiki” space needing
to be blacklisted use case.
The "XWiki" page is provided by an extension so solution 4 will exclude it
by default (unless the admin adds an exception).
So in other words my preference from a functional POV is both solutions 2,
3 and 4 :)
Note that I don’t know at this point the performance cost.
Thanks
-Vincent
On 2 May 2018, at 18:02, Marius Dumitru Florea
<
mariusdumitru.florea(a)xwiki.com> wrote:
Hi devs,
Some users have complained that the navigation panel shows top level
pages
that they don't need/want to navigate to,
most importantly the XWiki
page.
There are multiple ways in which we can fix this.
Solution 1: Content Page
Create a top level "Content" page for user content and configure the
navigation panel to show the contents of this page.
Pros:
* Namespace isolation (no conflicts between user pages and application
pages)
Cons:
* The user may want to navigate to a top level application page (although
it's better to use the application panel for this instead)
* All the paths / references used to access the user content will start
with this "Content" page
Solution 2: Blacklisting
Add support for specifying a list of (top level) pages to exclude from
the
navigation panel.
Pros:
* The user (top level) pages created later on will be visible in the
navigation panel
* The blacklist could be used to filter not only top level pages but also
any nested page from the navigation panel.
Cons:
* The blacklist depends on the installed apps. The administrator may have
to update the blacklist when new applications are installed
* The blacklist depends on whether you view hidden pages or not. If you
don't view hidden pages then the blacklist probably contains 4 pages:
Help,
Menu, Sandbox, XWiki (there is an application
panel entry for each of
them
except XWiki), which is manageable. If you view
hidden pages then you
need
to black list 28+ pages which is hard to manage
and maintain.
* The filtering needs to happen on the database (otherwise we break the
pagination) so the database queries will become a bit more complex, which
could led to some performance penalty, depending on how long the
blacklist
is.
Solution 3: Whitelisting
Add support for controlling the list of top level pages that are
displayed
in the navigation panel.
Pros:
* the whitelist doesn't depend on the installed extensions or hidden
pages
so it's easier to maintain.
* the whitelist can be used to order the top level pages visible in the
navigation panel.
* the whitelist can be used to show at the top level (for navigation
purpose) a page that is not really a top level page
* No performance penalty
Cons:
* The user (top level) pages created later on will not be visible in the
navigation panel. The administrator will have to add them to the
whitelist
if they are useful for the navigation. Although
creating top level pages
should happen less often than creating nested pages under the existing
top
level pages.
* the whitelist controls only the first level in the tree. The next
levels
will be dynamic (database queries) and with the
default order.
Solution 4: Exclude extension pages
Exclude from the navigation panel the top level pages that belong to an
installed extension, allowing the administrator to make some exceptions
(e.g. keep the home page). The rationale is that if an installed
extension
has a top level page then that page is most
probably the application home
page which should be accessible from the application panel. This can be
implemented on top of solution 3 (the whitelist is basically dynamic: we
collect the top level pages that don't belong to an extension).
Pros:
* It does a clear separation between applications (accessible from the
application panel) and content (accessible from the navigation panel).
The
navigation panel is currently mixing application
pages and (user) content
pages.
* The administrator doesn't need to update the navigation panel
configuration to exclude a top level application home page each time an
application is installed
* The hidden top level extension code pages are not shown even when "show
hidden pages" is set to true
* The user top level pages created later on appear in the tree
automatically
Cons:
* The user won't be able to navigate easily to an application home page:
** if the application panel is not shown
** or if the application doesn't provide an application panel entry
** or if the administrator has removed the entry from the application
panel
I prefer solution 4.
WDYT?
Thanks,
Marius