23 Nov
2015
23 Nov
'15
5 p.m.
Hi Vincent,
thanks for your feedback. Please see my answers below.
On Mon, Nov 23, 2015 at 4:43 PM, vincent(a)massol.net <vincent(a)massol.net>
wrote:
Hi Guillaume,
See below.
On 23 Nov 2015 at 15:30:09, Guillaume Lerouge (guillaume(a)xwiki.com(mailto:
guillaume(a)xwiki.com)) wrote:
Indeed, is would answer the use case quite nicely.
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
This does not change the fact that the generic platform should be a
sensible "default" state. While I agree that item 2 would be fixed by
flavors and item 3 isn't needed with the drawer solution described above,
it does not change my feedback about item 1 (though I'm not sure what you
mean by "generic" nor how you define it).
In any case, at the moment I don't see how the current main wiki is more
"generic" than the solution I'm proposing. Actually, I think it's
actually
less "generic" since it's further away from what people expect of a
"wiki"
than my proposal, since most wikis don't have an app bar but a navigation
tree :-)
In conclusion I don’t see how points 1, 2 or 3 could be integrated in a
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.
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.
I happen to be well aware of that page since I was part of the discussion
thread that led to its creation :-) Unfortunately, it's a poor solution to
the issue at hand. You can't expect a brand new user to go through that
page and understand all the implications when pondering whether to create a
nested page or a sub-wiki.
IIRC, you've quoted the KISS principle at us a number of times in the past.
I'm sure you'll agree that this page is anything but Simple ;-) Having a
simple heuristic for users asking the question would be much better IMHO.
Thanks,
Guillaume
Thanks
-Vincent
Guillaume