Re: [xwiki-devs] [Proposal][UX] Bundle Menu app in XWiki

Indeed, the obvious need solved by the Menu application is Custom Navigation. With the introduction of Nested Pages, we have lost the ability to create "shortcuts" in the hierarchy, something that we were previously able to do with the explicit parent-child relationship, so now the storage and navigation are the same. Relying on the Navigation panel, that expresses all the content in a wiki, is impractical, and can only address the "browsing" use case, something where the admin does not have control on what the user is exposed to. Sure, a better content structuring might help, but it can still easily get out of hand when everything you store is considered navigation. Writing a custom panel is a solution, however it may not be in the mental model of someone new to XWiki, that is searching for the "menu section" to define his custom navigation. Additionally, panels get a bit dirty by mixing velocity (for the panel header) with wiki syntax and they might intimidate users. They have a nice drag&drop wizard, which is great, but I`m not sure how many admins actually edit/create panels. Finally, on a multiwiki setup (like an intranet or even in our case, xwiki.org), relying on a Panel for establishing a menu can be painful since you need to configure each individual wiki to use the same, main-wiki defined, panel. One big advantage of the Menu application is that you could create a menu, which is basically an UIX, set it`s scope to Global and you are done. It will be visible to all users, on all subwikis. One complication of the menu app is that it`s designed as a user-centered application so regular users could create their own menus as well. If we still want to leave it exposed to users, we need to have it visible under the Applications panel. We could rename it to "Custom Menu" application and protect the default menu to be editable only by admins, thus trying to mitigate a bit of the confusion it can cause to users. Even so, offering by default the ability for users to define custom menus is not something you see often and it might do a bit more harm than good. One way to remove even more confusion (and I think it was mentioned) would be to completely restrict the use of the bundled menu application to wiki admins only and accessing the app from Administration instead (with the configurable class mechanism). As an alternative, we could even consider implementing a default Menu UIX in XWiki, that admins could easily customize and that would have nothing to do with the (custom) Menu application that is on contrib. I think I would prefer this instead of dealing with all the complications of the menu app. Thanks, Eduard On Wed, Apr 5, 2017 at 12:59 PM, Vincent Massol <vincent(a)massol.net> wrote: