On Thu, Jan 13, 2011 at 09:23, Vincent Massol <[email protected]> wrote:

Hi devs,

This is a thread to discuss what kind of title behavior we want in the future. I've listed some topics I consider open below. Could you give me your opinion about them?

1) Should we force titles to be mandatory by default

We can always fallback to page name, why adding a constrain where none is required ? 2) Should we merge page names and titles in the UI (ie only expose titles

and compute page names based on it)

I do not think so, I see page names as URL and title as pretty names or the like. So completely hiding page names is not so good, since being able to choose URL is a feature. I think we should be keep both and be able to help generating page names and hiding page name as much as possible (since these are at least in URL) for those who should (viewer) or would (lazy editor) not care about it.

3) Do we want titles to be generated from content if the title is empty or not. If 1) is agreed then there'll always be a title set so this is probably not needed

I do not like generated titles, since these are difficult to manage and even cause confusion. When the UI has been changed to display the title, we have had the double title issue, and we had to hack for fixing it. This have obviously failed in some cases, and I have edited many pages to fix such issue. So, no I do not think title should be generated, but that title should fallback to page names.

4) Should we allow wiki syntax in the title field and make that field a textarea rather than a single line string (to allow scripts to generate titles, this is useful for applications for example). Note that currently the title field can only contain velocity and no wiki syntax AFAIK.

This is really useful for applications to dynamically generate titles. On the other hand, it add a high level of complexity since title may depend on the way a page is opened, something that defeat the usage of titles in navigation panel for example. There is also other options,why not allow applications to overwrite a static title while the page is displayed, and use the title (static) when referencing to the page from other pages.

Any other topic to discuss related to titles?

- Jérôme has started discussing pretty names for Spaces, and this could be closely related to titles. - Usage of titles should be discuss as well, since these usage may cause some constrains to the way we could implements titles. Do we want title in navigation, links, breadcrumbs, .... ? I think the answer is Yes, and to perform these properly we may need a title cache or to constrain title to be almost static. I am in favor of static titles since it will cause less confusion and is more in the idea that titles are pretty names for pages. Hope this open the discussion in a good way. Denis

Thanks -Vincent

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-- Denis Gervalle SOFTEC sa - CEO eGuilde sarl - CTO

Hi, Having page name and page title is VERY disturbing for end users. We should in one way or another merge (not make accessible for end user) page name and page title. IMO this is a major usability concern. I logged a jira for the purpose: XE-907 see below. On Thu, Jan 13, 2011 at 9:23 AM, Vincent Massol <[email protected]> wrote:

Hi devs,

This is a thread to discuss what kind of title behavior we want in the future. I've listed some topics I consider open below. Could you give me your opinion about them?

1) Should we force titles to be mandatory by default

For content pages, it does not make sense to have a page without a title (it is like someone with no name!). And since we don't have page type feature I guess the answer is "title should be mandatory" for all type of pages.

2) Should we merge page names and titles in the UI (ie only expose titles and compute page names based on it)

This is needed. If we don't want that for all users we could enable page name and page title separation based on user type.

3) Do we want titles to be generated from content if the title is empty or not. If 1) is agreed then there'll always be a title set so this is probably not needed

If we choose 1) then I would say that page title should be input by user and not generated.

4) Should we allow wiki syntax in the title field and make that field a textarea rather than a single line string (to allow scripts to generate titles, this is useful for applications for example). Note that currently the title field can only contain velocity and no wiki syntax AFAIK.

As you say, we are already able to type velocity syntax in page titles which is enough IMO. Unless there is use case to illustrate wiki syntax in page title, I am not sure we should work on that.

Any other topic to discuss related to titles?

Just like Denis mentions, space pretty name is closely related to this topic. Application Within Minutes also has some topics with page names.

Thanks -Vincent

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