[xwiki-devs] Extension documents edit protection and Main.WebHome
Hi devs, We started to think about https://jira.xwiki.org/browse/XWIKI-14377 with Caty and she noticed that it might not be as simple as "all extensions pages are protected" because there is extensions pages that are almost always supposed to be modified: first example is Main.WebHome which is modified 99% of the time but another good one is Sandbox or Quicklinks panel. So what do we do about it ? I'm not fully sure yet but here are some ideas : 1) So what ? It's still extension pages and you might still have conflicts during next upgrade. If you want standard pages to be modified then generate them during install. 2) Only show the warning when a page is hidden and consider all non hidden pages as OK to modify 3) Explicitly mark each standard page that is OK to be modified with some xobject 3.a) EM XAR handler behave with these pages as it always did 3.b) EM XAR handler has a special support for these pages controlled by one of the xobject fields (skip the document from any merge if there is any customization, always overwrite any customization, etc.) WDYT ? 1) might be too harsh, generating Main.WebHome might be doable (but still a pain to maintain) but it's quite a pain to generate the whole Sandbox space (and not even talking about maintaining it...) 2) we might still want to see some application home pages in the search result and most of them should really not be modified 3.a) will still have the "what should I do" effect sometime for pages that user is allowed to modify 3.b) has my preference right now, sounds like the nicest from user and author point of view, can even be used for other use cases than edit protection control -- Thomas Mortagne
On Tue, Nov 7, 2017 at 1:00 PM, Thomas Mortagne <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi devs,
We started to think about https://jira.xwiki.org/browse/XWIKI-14377 with Caty and she noticed that it might not be as simple as "all extensions pages are protected" because there is extensions pages that are almost always supposed to be modified: first example is Main.WebHome which is modified 99% of the time but another good one is Sandbox or Quicklinks panel.
So what do we do about it ?
I'm not fully sure yet but here are some ideas :
1) So what ? It's still extension pages and you might still have conflicts during next upgrade. If you want standard pages to be modified then generate them during install.
2) Only show the warning when a page is hidden and consider all non hidden pages as OK to modify
3) Explicitly mark each standard page that is OK to be modified with some xobject 3.a) EM XAR handler behave with these pages as it always did 3.b) EM XAR handler has a special support for these pages controlled by one of the xobject fields (skip the document from any merge if there is any customization, always overwrite any customization, etc.)
WDYT ?
1) might be too harsh, generating Main.WebHome might be doable (but still a pain to maintain) but it's quite a pain to generate the whole Sandbox space (and not even talking about maintaining it...)
Don't forget that some of these pages are localized.
2) we might still want to see some application home pages in the search result and most of them should really not be modified
3.a) will still have the "what should I do" effect sometime for pages that user is allowed to modify
3.b) has my preference right now, sounds like the nicest from user and author point of view, can even be used for other use cases than edit protection control
Not sure how hard would be technically, but instead of an exception list, I would like an inclusion list. We talked so much in the past about Application Descriptor and we also have some patterns put in place, like placing the code inside a Code space and mark the technical pages hidden. I believe all the content pages of an application should be editable by user and should be ignored during an upgrade, but all the technical / code pages should not be encouraged to edit and they will need to be upgraded on new releases. Instead of marking what pages should be ignored, we should mark what pages we should upgrade and restrict from editing, thus defining the application's structure and descriptor. The only downside with this approach is that it's more work to do, since there are fewer 'content' (some Homepages, some demo content) pages inside our applications, than the technical pages. Also if we were to go into the application description direction we might want to move the pages in a nested structure, enforcing the rules we have on application structure. But this might mean a lot of work and we need to be convinced of the benefits. Also this goes beyond editing and also we would want to warn on other operations, like move, delete. Marking what pages are ok to Edit, would not provide us information if that page is ok to move and thus won't break the application. Thomas also talked about a preference in the User Profile that would allow editing and won't display the warning, intended for developers to ease their work. This is one aspect to consider, the other is if we want special permissions for some users, like administrators. Thanks, Caty
-- Thomas Mortagne
On Tue, Nov 7, 2017 at 1:02 PM, Ecaterina Moraru (Valica) <[email protected]> wrote:
On Tue, Nov 7, 2017 at 1:00 PM, Thomas Mortagne <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi devs,
We started to think about https://jira.xwiki.org/browse/XWIKI-14377 with Caty and she noticed that it might not be as simple as "all extensions pages are protected" because there is extensions pages that are almost always supposed to be modified: first example is Main.WebHome which is modified 99% of the time but another good one is Sandbox or Quicklinks panel.
So what do we do about it ?
I'm not fully sure yet but here are some ideas :
1) So what ? It's still extension pages and you might still have conflicts during next upgrade. If you want standard pages to be modified then generate them during install.
2) Only show the warning when a page is hidden and consider all non hidden pages as OK to modify
3) Explicitly mark each standard page that is OK to be modified with some xobject 3.a) EM XAR handler behave with these pages as it always did 3.b) EM XAR handler has a special support for these pages controlled by one of the xobject fields (skip the document from any merge if there is any customization, always overwrite any customization, etc.)
WDYT ?
1) might be too harsh, generating Main.WebHome might be doable (but still a pain to maintain) but it's quite a pain to generate the whole Sandbox space (and not even talking about maintaining it...)
Don't forget that some of these pages are localized.
And there is that too which makes this option even more difficult to apply.
2) we might still want to see some application home pages in the search result and most of them should really not be modified
3.a) will still have the "what should I do" effect sometime for pages that user is allowed to modify
3.b) has my preference right now, sounds like the nicest from user and author point of view, can even be used for other use cases than edit protection control
Not sure how hard would be technically, but instead of an exception list, I would like an inclusion list.
Since 90% of the pages coming from extensions ares stuff nobody should touch I really don't think this is a good idea.
We talked so much in the past about Application Descriptor and we also have some patterns put in place, like placing the code inside a Code space and mark the technical pages hidden.
I believe all the content pages of an application should be editable by user and should be ignored during an upgrade, but all the technical / code pages should not be encouraged to edit and they will need to be upgraded on new releases.
Instead of marking what pages should be ignored, we should mark what pages we should upgrade and restrict from editing, thus defining the application's structure and descriptor.
The only downside with this approach is that it's more work to do, since there are fewer 'content' (some Homepages, some demo content) pages inside our applications, than the technical pages.
Also if we were to go into the application description direction we might want to move the pages in a nested structure, enforcing the rules we have on application structure. But this might mean a lot of work and we need to be convinced of the benefits.
Also this goes beyond editing and also we would want to warn on other operations, like move, delete. Marking what pages are ok to Edit, would not provide us information if that page is ok to move and thus won't break the application.
Actually 3.b support well all that since the whole point is to indicate what kind of page it is (the page need to exist but can be modified, the page can be deleted, the page should never be modified, etc.). Default being "nobody should touch this page in any way" since that's what we want for most pages.
Thomas also talked about a preference in the User Profile that would allow editing and won't display the warning, intended for developers to ease their work. This is one aspect to consider, the other is if we want special permissions for some users, like administrators.
This is a different subject IMO.
Thanks, Caty
-- Thomas Mortagne
-- Thomas Mortagne
Hi, One option I was discussion with Caty that would cover the need to not have code pages modified, while also allowing devs (including us) to work and experiment is that we only add a warning/banner in edit mode on pages belonging to an extension, informing the user that their changes *will be discarded when upgrading* and what he could do instead, to keep them. So, when upgrading to a new version, we would have the following directions to decide on: 1) We could show the list of modified extensions with options for each extensions (not each document) to: a) discard changes b) backup changes c) merge changes (I would personally not be in favor of keeping this, since it will be too tempting for everyone to abuse it and we would be back at the current state when upgrades take a very long time and are hard to do) 2) We could simply discard any modifications done on the extensions and upgrade to the newest version (i.e. never do the 3-way merge) The main idea is that you are free to do changes and experiment, but if you want your work to be used in production or to survive an upgrade, you need to do one of the following things: A) Contribute your changes so that they are included in the next version of the application. B) Publish your changes as a fork of the application. Optionally, it could be a light fork which only contains the modified pages and has a fixed version dependency on the standard application. It will be your job to keep your fork up to date, otherwise you will be stuck using an older version of the application. If the application is part of the Standard Flavor and because of the fixed dependency version, it will mean you will not be able to upgrade XWiki either until you update your fork first. If you don't use a fixed version dependency, you risk upgrading the standard application to a version that is no longer compatible with your changes. Thanks, Eduard On Tue, Nov 7, 2017 at 4:16 PM, Thomas Mortagne <[email protected]> wrote:
On Tue, Nov 7, 2017 at 1:02 PM, Ecaterina Moraru (Valica) <[email protected]> wrote:
On Tue, Nov 7, 2017 at 1:00 PM, Thomas Mortagne < [email protected]> wrote:
Hi devs,
We started to think about https://jira.xwiki.org/browse/XWIKI-14377 with Caty and she noticed that it might not be as simple as "all extensions pages are protected" because there is extensions pages that are almost always supposed to be modified: first example is Main.WebHome which is modified 99% of the time but another good one is Sandbox or Quicklinks panel.
So what do we do about it ?
I'm not fully sure yet but here are some ideas :
1) So what ? It's still extension pages and you might still have conflicts during next upgrade. If you want standard pages to be modified then generate them during install.
2) Only show the warning when a page is hidden and consider all non hidden pages as OK to modify
3) Explicitly mark each standard page that is OK to be modified with some xobject 3.a) EM XAR handler behave with these pages as it always did 3.b) EM XAR handler has a special support for these pages controlled by one of the xobject fields (skip the document from any merge if there is any customization, always overwrite any customization, etc.)
WDYT ?
1) might be too harsh, generating Main.WebHome might be doable (but still a pain to maintain) but it's quite a pain to generate the whole Sandbox space (and not even talking about maintaining it...)
Don't forget that some of these pages are localized.
And there is that too which makes this option even more difficult to apply.
2) we might still want to see some application home pages in the search result and most of them should really not be modified
3.a) will still have the "what should I do" effect sometime for pages that user is allowed to modify
3.b) has my preference right now, sounds like the nicest from user and author point of view, can even be used for other use cases than edit protection control
Not sure how hard would be technically, but instead of an exception
list, I
would like an inclusion list.
Since 90% of the pages coming from extensions ares stuff nobody should touch I really don't think this is a good idea.
We talked so much in the past about Application Descriptor and we also have some patterns put in place, like placing the code inside a Code space and mark the technical pages hidden.
I believe all the content pages of an application should be editable by user and should be ignored during an upgrade, but all the technical / code pages should not be encouraged to edit and they will need to be upgraded on new releases.
Instead of marking what pages should be ignored, we should mark what pages we should upgrade and restrict from editing, thus defining the application's structure and descriptor.
The only downside with this approach is that it's more work to do, since there are fewer 'content' (some Homepages, some demo content) pages inside our applications, than the technical pages.
Also if we were to go into the application description direction we might want to move the pages in a nested structure, enforcing the rules we have on application structure. But this might mean a lot of work and we need to be convinced of the benefits.
Also this goes beyond editing and also we would want to warn on other operations, like move, delete. Marking what pages are ok to Edit, would not provide us information if that page is ok to move and thus won't break the application.
Actually 3.b support well all that since the whole point is to indicate what kind of page it is (the page need to exist but can be modified, the page can be deleted, the page should never be modified, etc.). Default being "nobody should touch this page in any way" since that's what we want for most pages.
Thomas also talked about a preference in the User Profile that would
allow
editing and won't display the warning, intended for developers to ease their work. This is one aspect to consider, the other is if we want special permissions for some users, like administrators.
This is a different subject IMO.
Thanks, Caty
-- Thomas Mortagne
-- Thomas Mortagne
The second topic of interest was the extension pages that are designed to be modified, like the demo AWM apps or intro blog post, homepage, etc. 1) IMO, all these pages should be separated from the code pages of an extension and moved to a "-content" extension. At this point, we could introduce a flag on a XAR extension that its pages are modifiable and all the above described limitations will not be enforced and, on upgrade, the user would be free to choose what happens to the changes (i.e. discard, backup or even merge). 2) The second option would be to explicitly mark (in the extension descriptor ?) modifiable pages inside a XAR extension, so to continue mixing code pages with content pages, but I would prefer we would not continue to do it. I guess this would be towards proposal 3) from Thomas, but I think I would prefer it to be done from an extension level, and not page level (since that would imply editing the page and might collide with previous decisions). Thanks, Eduard On Tue, Nov 7, 2017 at 4:43 PM, Eduard Moraru <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi,
One option I was discussion with Caty that would cover the need to not have code pages modified, while also allowing devs (including us) to work and experiment is that we only add a warning/banner in edit mode on pages belonging to an extension, informing the user that their changes *will be discarded when upgrading* and what he could do instead, to keep them.
So, when upgrading to a new version, we would have the following directions to decide on:
1) We could show the list of modified extensions with options for each extensions (not each document) to: a) discard changes b) backup changes c) merge changes (I would personally not be in favor of keeping this, since it will be too tempting for everyone to abuse it and we would be back at the current state when upgrades take a very long time and are hard to do)
2) We could simply discard any modifications done on the extensions and upgrade to the newest version (i.e. never do the 3-way merge)
The main idea is that you are free to do changes and experiment, but if you want your work to be used in production or to survive an upgrade, you need to do one of the following things:
A) Contribute your changes so that they are included in the next version of the application.
B) Publish your changes as a fork of the application. Optionally, it could be a light fork which only contains the modified pages and has a fixed version dependency on the standard application. It will be your job to keep your fork up to date, otherwise you will be stuck using an older version of the application. If the application is part of the Standard Flavor and because of the fixed dependency version, it will mean you will not be able to upgrade XWiki either until you update your fork first. If you don't use a fixed version dependency, you risk upgrading the standard application to a version that is no longer compatible with your changes.
Thanks, Eduard
On Tue, Nov 7, 2017 at 4:16 PM, Thomas Mortagne <[email protected]
wrote:
On Tue, Nov 7, 2017 at 1:02 PM, Ecaterina Moraru (Valica) <[email protected]> wrote:
On Tue, Nov 7, 2017 at 1:00 PM, Thomas Mortagne < [email protected]> wrote:
Hi devs,
We started to think about https://jira.xwiki.org/browse/XWIKI-14377 with Caty and she noticed that it might not be as simple as "all extensions pages are protected" because there is extensions pages that are almost always supposed to be modified: first example is Main.WebHome which is modified 99% of the time but another good one is Sandbox or Quicklinks panel.
So what do we do about it ?
I'm not fully sure yet but here are some ideas :
1) So what ? It's still extension pages and you might still have conflicts during next upgrade. If you want standard pages to be modified then generate them during install.
2) Only show the warning when a page is hidden and consider all non hidden pages as OK to modify
3) Explicitly mark each standard page that is OK to be modified with some xobject 3.a) EM XAR handler behave with these pages as it always did 3.b) EM XAR handler has a special support for these pages controlled by one of the xobject fields (skip the document from any merge if there is any customization, always overwrite any customization, etc.)
WDYT ?
1) might be too harsh, generating Main.WebHome might be doable (but still a pain to maintain) but it's quite a pain to generate the whole Sandbox space (and not even talking about maintaining it...)
Don't forget that some of these pages are localized.
And there is that too which makes this option even more difficult to apply.
2) we might still want to see some application home pages in the search result and most of them should really not be modified
3.a) will still have the "what should I do" effect sometime for pages that user is allowed to modify
3.b) has my preference right now, sounds like the nicest from user and author point of view, can even be used for other use cases than edit protection control
Not sure how hard would be technically, but instead of an exception
list, I
would like an inclusion list.
Since 90% of the pages coming from extensions ares stuff nobody should touch I really don't think this is a good idea.
We talked so much in the past about Application Descriptor and we also have some patterns put in place, like placing the code inside a Code space and mark the technical pages hidden.
I believe all the content pages of an application should be editable by user and should be ignored during an upgrade, but all the technical / code pages should not be encouraged to edit and they will need to be upgraded on new releases.
Instead of marking what pages should be ignored, we should mark what pages we should upgrade and restrict from editing, thus defining the application's structure and descriptor.
The only downside with this approach is that it's more work to do, since there are fewer 'content' (some Homepages, some demo content) pages inside our applications, than the technical pages.
Also if we were to go into the application description direction we might want to move the pages in a nested structure, enforcing the rules we have on application structure. But this might mean a lot of work and we need to be convinced of the benefits.
Also this goes beyond editing and also we would want to warn on other operations, like move, delete. Marking what pages are ok to Edit, would not provide us information if that page is ok to move and thus won't break the application.
Actually 3.b support well all that since the whole point is to indicate what kind of page it is (the page need to exist but can be modified, the page can be deleted, the page should never be modified, etc.). Default being "nobody should touch this page in any way" since that's what we want for most pages.
Thomas also talked about a preference in the User Profile that would
allow
editing and won't display the warning, intended for developers to ease their work. This is one aspect to consider, the other is if we want special permissions for some users, like administrators.
This is a different subject IMO.
Thanks, Caty
-- Thomas Mortagne
-- Thomas Mortagne
And then there are pages that you want users to EDIT in inline mode, but not in wiki, example: User Profile, Dashboard. UserDirectory is also problematic, but it's using view mode to allow customizations. On Tue, Nov 7, 2017 at 4:58 PM, Eduard Moraru <[email protected]> wrote:
The second topic of interest was the extension pages that are designed to be modified, like the demo AWM apps or intro blog post, homepage, etc.
1) IMO, all these pages should be separated from the code pages of an extension and moved to a "-content" extension. At this point, we could introduce a flag on a XAR extension that its pages are modifiable and all the above described limitations will not be enforced and, on upgrade, the user would be free to choose what happens to the changes (i.e. discard, backup or even merge).
2) The second option would be to explicitly mark (in the extension descriptor ?) modifiable pages inside a XAR extension, so to continue mixing code pages with content pages, but I would prefer we would not continue to do it. I guess this would be towards proposal 3) from Thomas, but I think I would prefer it to be done from an extension level, and not page level (since that would imply editing the page and might collide with previous decisions).
Thanks, Eduard
On Tue, Nov 7, 2017 at 4:43 PM, Eduard Moraru <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi,
One option I was discussion with Caty that would cover the need to not have code pages modified, while also allowing devs (including us) to work and experiment is that we only add a warning/banner in edit mode on pages belonging to an extension, informing the user that their changes *will be discarded when upgrading* and what he could do instead, to keep them.
So, when upgrading to a new version, we would have the following directions to decide on:
1) We could show the list of modified extensions with options for each extensions (not each document) to: a) discard changes b) backup changes c) merge changes (I would personally not be in favor of keeping this, since it will be too tempting for everyone to abuse it and we would be back at the current state when upgrades take a very long time and are hard to do)
2) We could simply discard any modifications done on the extensions and upgrade to the newest version (i.e. never do the 3-way merge)
The main idea is that you are free to do changes and experiment, but if you want your work to be used in production or to survive an upgrade, you need to do one of the following things:
A) Contribute your changes so that they are included in the next version of the application.
B) Publish your changes as a fork of the application. Optionally, it could be a light fork which only contains the modified pages and has a fixed version dependency on the standard application. It will be your job to keep your fork up to date, otherwise you will be stuck using an older version of the application. If the application is part of the Standard Flavor and because of the fixed dependency version, it will mean you will not be able to upgrade XWiki either until you update your fork first. If you don't use a fixed version dependency, you risk upgrading the standard application to a version that is no longer compatible with your changes.
Thanks, Eduard
On Tue, Nov 7, 2017 at 4:16 PM, Thomas Mortagne < [email protected]
wrote:
On Tue, Nov 7, 2017 at 1:02 PM, Ecaterina Moraru (Valica) <[email protected]> wrote:
On Tue, Nov 7, 2017 at 1:00 PM, Thomas Mortagne < [email protected]> wrote:
Hi devs,
We started to think about https://jira.xwiki.org/browse/XWIKI-14377 with Caty and she noticed that it might not be as simple as "all extensions pages are protected" because there is extensions pages that are almost always supposed to be modified: first example is Main.WebHome which is modified 99% of the time but another good one is Sandbox or Quicklinks panel.
So what do we do about it ?
I'm not fully sure yet but here are some ideas :
1) So what ? It's still extension pages and you might still have conflicts during next upgrade. If you want standard pages to be modified then generate them during install.
2) Only show the warning when a page is hidden and consider all non hidden pages as OK to modify
3) Explicitly mark each standard page that is OK to be modified with some xobject 3.a) EM XAR handler behave with these pages as it always did 3.b) EM XAR handler has a special support for these pages controlled by one of the xobject fields (skip the document from any merge if there is any customization, always overwrite any customization, etc.)
WDYT ?
1) might be too harsh, generating Main.WebHome might be doable (but still a pain to maintain) but it's quite a pain to generate the whole Sandbox space (and not even talking about maintaining it...)
Don't forget that some of these pages are localized.
And there is that too which makes this option even more difficult to apply.
2) we might still want to see some application home pages in the search result and most of them should really not be modified
3.a) will still have the "what should I do" effect sometime for pages that user is allowed to modify
3.b) has my preference right now, sounds like the nicest from user
and
author point of view, can even be used for other use cases than edit protection control
Not sure how hard would be technically, but instead of an exception list, I would like an inclusion list.
Since 90% of the pages coming from extensions ares stuff nobody should touch I really don't think this is a good idea.
We talked so much in the past about Application Descriptor and we also have some patterns put in place, like placing the code inside a Code space and mark the technical pages hidden.
I believe all the content pages of an application should be editable by user and should be ignored during an upgrade, but all the technical / code pages should not be encouraged to edit and they will need to be upgraded on new releases.
Instead of marking what pages should be ignored, we should mark what pages we should upgrade and restrict from editing, thus defining the application's structure and descriptor.
The only downside with this approach is that it's more work to do, since there are fewer 'content' (some Homepages, some demo content) pages inside our applications, than the technical pages.
Also if we were to go into the application description direction we might want to move the pages in a nested structure, enforcing the rules we have on application structure. But this might mean a lot of work and we need to be convinced of the benefits.
Also this goes beyond editing and also we would want to warn on other operations, like move, delete. Marking what pages are ok to Edit, would not provide us information if that page is ok to move and thus won't break the application.
Actually 3.b support well all that since the whole point is to indicate what kind of page it is (the page need to exist but can be modified, the page can be deleted, the page should never be modified, etc.). Default being "nobody should touch this page in any way" since that's what we want for most pages.
Thomas also talked about a preference in the User Profile that would
allow
editing and won't display the warning, intended for developers to ease their work. This is one aspect to consider, the other is if we want special permissions for some users, like administrators.
This is a different subject IMO.
Thanks, Caty
-- Thomas Mortagne
-- Thomas Mortagne
On Tue, Nov 7, 2017 at 1:00 PM, Thomas Mortagne <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi devs,
We started to think about https://jira.xwiki.org/browse/XWIKI-14377 with Caty and she noticed that it might not be as simple as "all extensions pages are protected" because there is extensions pages that are almost always supposed to be modified: first example is Main.WebHome which is modified 99% of the time but another good one is Sandbox or Quicklinks panel.
Another example is Blog.BlogIntroduction that people might want to delete, or even some categories like Blog.Personal, or any other apps that provide demo content. User might want to delete even Help.Applications.Contributors or Help.Applications.Movies When we talk about edit it's more easy since people will have the History to rollback to the initial version, but if the upgrade ignores the edited page who can an admin also upgrade this page? Also if someone will delete Help.Applications.Contributors and won't be able to restore it from Recycle Bin, if this is considered "content" data, will there still be a way to reinstall it? So we need a way to tell that an app comes with: - vital pages that shouldn't be modified if we want a smooth upgrade, - content / demo pages that users are encouraged to edit and make their own. These pages will be ignored and kept in the user version during an upgrade, but in case someone did something to them, there is a way to rollback to them or reinstall them (but this use case is very rare, especially since the pages were not vital). - user generated content that will be appended to any upgrade and kept as backup in case the app is uninstalled.
So what do we do about it ?
I'm not fully sure yet but here are some ideas :
1) So what ? It's still extension pages and you might still have conflicts during next upgrade. If you want standard pages to be modified then generate them during install.
2) Only show the warning when a page is hidden and consider all non hidden pages as OK to modify
3) Explicitly mark each standard page that is OK to be modified with some xobject 3.a) EM XAR handler behave with these pages as it always did 3.b) EM XAR handler has a special support for these pages controlled by one of the xobject fields (skip the document from any merge if there is any customization, always overwrite any customization, etc.)
WDYT ?
1) might be too harsh, generating Main.WebHome might be doable (but still a pain to maintain) but it's quite a pain to generate the whole Sandbox space (and not even talking about maintaining it...)
2) we might still want to see some application home pages in the search result and most of them should really not be modified
3.a) will still have the "what should I do" effect sometime for pages that user is allowed to modify
3.b) has my preference right now, sounds like the nicest from user and author point of view, can even be used for other use cases than edit protection control
-- Thomas Mortagne
Another problem are the default AWM apps, where we encouraged users to add their own class properties. This mechanism won't encourage this behavior anymore. On Tue, Nov 7, 2017 at 2:22 PM, Ecaterina Moraru (Valica) <[email protected]
wrote:
On Tue, Nov 7, 2017 at 1:00 PM, Thomas Mortagne <[email protected]
wrote:
Hi devs,
We started to think about https://jira.xwiki.org/browse/XWIKI-14377 with Caty and she noticed that it might not be as simple as "all extensions pages are protected" because there is extensions pages that are almost always supposed to be modified: first example is Main.WebHome which is modified 99% of the time but another good one is Sandbox or Quicklinks panel.
Another example is Blog.BlogIntroduction that people might want to delete, or even some categories like Blog.Personal, or any other apps that provide demo content. User might want to delete even Help.Applications.Contributors or Help.Applications.Movies
When we talk about edit it's more easy since people will have the History to rollback to the initial version, but if the upgrade ignores the edited page who can an admin also upgrade this page?
Also if someone will delete Help.Applications.Contributors and won't be able to restore it from Recycle Bin, if this is considered "content" data, will there still be a way to reinstall it?
So we need a way to tell that an app comes with: - vital pages that shouldn't be modified if we want a smooth upgrade, - content / demo pages that users are encouraged to edit and make their own. These pages will be ignored and kept in the user version during an upgrade, but in case someone did something to them, there is a way to rollback to them or reinstall them (but this use case is very rare, especially since the pages were not vital). - user generated content that will be appended to any upgrade and kept as backup in case the app is uninstalled.
So what do we do about it ?
I'm not fully sure yet but here are some ideas :
1) So what ? It's still extension pages and you might still have conflicts during next upgrade. If you want standard pages to be modified then generate them during install.
2) Only show the warning when a page is hidden and consider all non hidden pages as OK to modify
3) Explicitly mark each standard page that is OK to be modified with some xobject 3.a) EM XAR handler behave with these pages as it always did 3.b) EM XAR handler has a special support for these pages controlled by one of the xobject fields (skip the document from any merge if there is any customization, always overwrite any customization, etc.)
WDYT ?
1) might be too harsh, generating Main.WebHome might be doable (but still a pain to maintain) but it's quite a pain to generate the whole Sandbox space (and not even talking about maintaining it...)
2) we might still want to see some application home pages in the search result and most of them should really not be modified
3.a) will still have the "what should I do" effect sometime for pages that user is allowed to modify
3.b) has my preference right now, sounds like the nicest from user and author point of view, can even be used for other use cases than edit protection control
-- Thomas Mortagne
participants (3)
-
Ecaterina Moraru (Valica) -
Eduard Moraru -
Thomas Mortagne