Hi Bryn,
Thanks for your feedback, lots of good points. See below for a point by point comment.
On 14 May 2016, at 00:47, Bryn Jeffries
<bryn.jeffries(a)sydney.edu.au> wrote:
Useful comparisons, but I wasn't sure who the expected reader would be.
I’ve just sent another email explaining more the context and the reason for this
initiative.
The XWiki vs Confluence comparison feels rather biased
so wouldn't be very helpful to someone trying to make a rational decision.
The goal is of course to be as unbiased as possible although it’s never fully possible to
do so. At least we need to find out the parts that are not correct and remove them or word
them better. The goal is to highlight the strengths of XWiki vs Confluence and MediaWiki.
The table makes them seem identical (perhaps it would
be useful to highlight the actual differences) aside from license.
I agree that I’m not sure we need to list the stuff that are similar and maybe it would be
better to only mention the differences. Now that said, I think the idea is also for
neophytes to wikis to be able to understand this page. We need to decide which we wish to
have.
Both are listed as having a ticketing plugin, but last
time I checked (admittedly over a year ago) I couldn't find a robust plugin anywhere
close to Confluence's offerings.
You seem to be knowing Confluence which is great, since it’s been more than 10 years that
I haven’t used it myself.
Indeed, I don’t know why there’s this "Ticket plugin” mentioned. I’ll check with
Caty. XWiki certainly doesn’t have a full ticket extension right now AFAIK. The
closest I can think of is the Task Application:
http://extensions.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Extension/Task+Manager+Applicati…
The extensions in XWiki really vary in quality,
whereas Confluence has a lot of very polished plugins. That's at least been my
experience, and I think there's a need to distinguish between high-quality maintained
extensions vs. the more hacky ones.
Definitely. I’ve also discussed this with others and it’s time that we start curating
extensions and introduce some “Editor Picks” or “Recommended” extensions. I’ll start this
in another thread real soon.
The lack of a markup editor in Confluence is a big
difference. Might be worth illustrating further.
Agreed. Maybe the polyglotism too (ability to use various markup syntaxes).
I think the page hierarchy model is rather difference.
Confluence makes chaining of child pages very easy, and access restrictions to child pages
is simple to manage. XWiki was a bit clunky by comparison, but that was for 7.1 and maybe
the addition of sub-spaces in more recent versions makes this easier to manage.
Could you explain why it’s simpler with Confluence by comparison with, say, XWiki 7.4.3? I
think this now at least as easy if not more now. Same for access restrictions to children
pages.
See
http://platform.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Features/ContentOrganization
The other big difference, to me, is in documentation.
XWiki has changed a lot over the years, particularly in the API,
This is not fully correct. A lot of new APIs have been introduced, showing the dynamism of
the XWiki community indeed. However, we take very seriously backward-compatibility (so
seriously that breaking it fails our build automatically ;)). So all that worked are still
supposed to work. Do you have an example that you’ve noticed where it’s not true (it can
happen from time to time when we conscientiously decide to break a recent API that we
think nobody uses) .
and a lot of the material discoverable on the web is
out of date.
Any example? That would help to fix them.
My perception is that Confluence's API has been
more stable over successive releases and more effort has been invested in keeping
documentation up to date.
It’s certainly true that we need to improve on dev documentation (the user doc is probably
ok but the dev one can be improved).
Much of this difference is just a natural outcome of
the proprietary vs. open source backgrounds of each system.
Well our goal is to be open source and still be good on all fronts! :)
Re Confluence, they have lots of people working on the doc vs XWiki where it’s the
developers doing it, so it’s more a question of manpower than of proprietary vs open
source IMO.
What’s interesting though XWiki is a smaller team, we’re still progressing and innovative
at least as fast (if not more) as Confluence IMO. Lots of people have commented that they
prefer XWiki over Confluence. Some quotes are on
https://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/References/Testimonials
Anyway, let’s focus on editing this comparison page to make it as accurate as possible.
Keep the comments coming and feel free to edit the doc too if you wish.
Thanks
-Vincent
-----Original Message-----
> From: Ecaterina Moraru (Valica) [mailto:valicac@gmail.com]
> Sent: Saturday, 14 May 2016 1:05 AM
> To: XWiki Mailinglist; XWiki Mailinglist
> Subject: [xwiki-users] [Proposal] Comparing XWiki to MediaWiki and
> Confluence on
xwiki.org
>
> Hi,
>
> Since we had users asking on the IRC what are the differences between
> XWiki and other solutions, it would be a good idea to provide such pages on
> the
> website:
>
> - XWiki and MediaWiki
>
http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Drafts/XWiki-vs-MediaWiki
>
> - XWiki and Confluence
>
http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Drafts/XWiki-vs-Confluence
>
> It would be great to know if you agree with the listed content and if you find
> other similarities or distinctions between the above solutions.
>
> Additionally, what other solutions would you be interested in seeing
> comparison with?
>
> Thanks,
> Caty