Vincent Massol wrote:
On May 21, 2008, at 1:52 AM, Sergiu Dumitriu wrote:
Hi devs,
This is somewhat in response to the discussion about the new Administration page design.
Behind the scenes, there was a discussion about where should the Import page put the uploaded xar, in XWiki.Import (as it is done now), or in XWiki.XWikiPreferences. Both sides agreed that the administration should automatically find and use administration pages, but didn't agree on what "use" means. So, how should things work?
A. The main administration page contains links to other pages B. The main administration page includes other administration sheets
Option A means that each administration topic uses its own page to store configuration, which somehow breaks the current configuration mechanism, where all (global) settings go into the XWiki.XWikiPreferences page.
Global settings should still go to XWikiPreferences even with option A.
Option B means that each administration document is used only as a sheet, so all objects will be in XWiki.XWikiPreferences. If we choose B, then the best thing to do is to attach imported xars to the XWikiPreferences page, instead of Import. Doing otherwise will either be very hard or would break the convention.
So, the main question is: Do we keep all settings in the same document? Or do we allow each application/component to have its configuration in its own document?
BTW we already do this with the space's WebPreferences pages.
I don't understand this. WDYM?
I think it would be better to have all the configuration in one place, instead of spreading it all over the wiki.
It's not spreading it all over. It's the ability for each application to host its configuration data. The general configuration data should still go to XWikiPreferences. I think we should also keep the WebPreferences as is.
I'd be for adding one or several Application Preference pages for each applications. For example for the Blog we already have a Categories page holding the categories and this is fine to me. Similarly the Import/Export app (or rather the Admin app) has a page called Import that contains the XAR and I see this as very fine.
To summarize my position is to keep everything as it is now: * Global preferences in XWikiPreferences * Space preferences in WebPreferences * Application-specific preferences in pages in the application (like Blog.Categories, XWiki.Import, etc)
Well, the current UI proposal displays a list of tabs for global administration. Where would you put the application preferences? As other tabs, but linking to another document, or have a tab called Application settings with links? And should an application settings page still use the administration UI (I mean the list of administration tabs)? -- Sergiu Dumitriu http://purl.org/net/sergiu/