Hi Marius, See below
On 3 May 2018, at 13:24, Marius Dumitru Florea <[email protected]> wrote:
On Thu, May 3, 2018 at 1:44 PM, Vincent Massol <[email protected]> wrote:
On 3 May 2018, at 12:32, Marius Dumitru Florea < [email protected]> wrote:
On Thu, May 3, 2018 at 11:58 AM, Ecaterina Moraru (Valica) < [email protected]> wrote:
On Wed, May 2, 2018 at 7:02 PM, Marius Dumitru Florea < [email protected]> 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
S1: This solution is good if users would work in isolation or in the evaluation period, but for team and multiple people sharing spaces, I don't see this as a valid solution.
The Content space is for all users, shared. This is not about having a separate space for each user.
-0
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.
S2: I see the blacklist solution more as a hack for things in XWiki that should be fixed (have users outside XWiki space, move Sandbox into Help space, hide Help pages and provide a dedicated Help entry in the User menu, etc.) but we don't have the time to do it. -0 in an ideal state
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.
S3: I prefer this solution, but with the ability to also display some dynamic pattern, something like: display X, Y and all children of Z, or all pages starting with A, or all pages created by group N :) (they are just ideas, I know some are very hard to implement). +1
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
S4: I don't know if for our users this separation between apps and content is very clear.
I think our users (or their administrators at least) want to separate the applications from the content. So I think it would be good to have something dedicated to applications, the application panel, and something dedicated to content, the navigation panel.
I’m seeing this a bit as a “hack" since the separation would exist in the Nav panel but not elsewhere (AllDocs, other trees such as the Rename/Copy ones, etc).
I don't get it. The blacklist / whitelist would be applied *only* to the navigation panel also so what you propose is not consistent either.
In the end it boils down to how you view the Navigation panel I think. I view it as something that can be controlled by the user to decide what to see/not see. Deciding to see or not the apps is a choice.
I think if we want that separation we need to think about it more globally. AFAIR we had some discussions about this separation already and the proposed solution were different than the one proposed here. So if you want to go in this direction, we need to review the previous proposals and think more globally which IMO is going to take a lot of time.
I’m still thinking that we should allow users to define a white list and a black list and that’s all. That will cover all use cases that a generic platform requires.
Did you read the cons? Having to manually update the blacklist whenever you install an application is a pain.
Only if you don’t want to see the app you added in the nav panel :) BTW I said that I find it ok to have this “app filter” but as one of the white list filters that can be applied. So I’m not against it if it’s configurable.
And what about the hidden pages?
You mean the blacklisted pages?
Don't you find it hard to manage a blacklist of 28+ excludes?
Sure. And again I said I’m fine with with having this whitelist filter ;)
Solution 4 doesn't require maintenance from an administrator. When you install an app it's top level pages are excluded automatically.
BTW I’m not sure that’s enough. For example several apps have subspaces such as a Data space and a Code space. This means that the Data space would be displayed and thus the app will be displayed in the nav panel, no? Another note: I’m probably not understanding something because I don’t see the point of hiding, say, ReleaseNotes.Archives when we’ll display ReleaseNotes.Data.*. It could even be seen as a regression (I’m assuming in this example that ReleaseNotes.Archives is a page of the ReleaseNotes app, which it isn’t FTM). I also fail to see how this will remove XWiki and Home from the Nav menu since they’re not apps/extensions… Last point: when you say “top level pages are excluded” you mean default extension pages, not top level pages created by the app when it’s used, right?
When you create a top level page, it's shown automatically in the tree.
Thanks -Vincent
Then we can work on optimizing this later on when we decide how we do the separation between Content and apps and it’ll depend a lot on how we do it.
If we don’t fo this we risk rushing into a suboptimal solution.
WDYT?
Thanks -Vincent
Also they might create their own apps and they will want those to be part of the navigation.
They would want to have an entry in the application panel like the rest
of
the apps I think.
The ideal navigation should be able to state some important pages to be shown (static aspect), order that list in terms of priority, and later contain and navigate to pages created by the user or team (dynamic aspect). Adding metadatas to pages and creating apps on top of content is a major feature of XWiki and I don't want to remove these pages from the navigation. -0
I prefer solution 3, but with the ability to sort and also to include some dynamic parts :) is this possible?
Thanks, Caty
I prefer solution 4.
WDYT?
Thanks, Marius