[xwiki-users] A lot of Problems with XWIKI
by Goh Chong Leng, Jenson
We have managed to setup xwiki to work in our UNIX environment.
However, we faced a lot of problems with xwiki during runtime.
(1) Running xwiki in tomcat - The java process of tomcat can never be
shutdown properly without using
'hard' killing, i.e. kill -HUP <process id>. I have searched the web and
found that the cause is actually
quartz library holding on to a process and thus preventing the tomcat
jvm from shutting down.
See here http://jira.opensymphony.com/browse/QUARTZ-204 . The problem
is upgrading quartz to 1.6
doesn't resolve the problem and attempting to update the two properties
as recommended into
the quartz.properties file will cause tomcat startup failure. This is
quite frustrating, so any input on how
to resolve this problem is much appreciated. Of course, the main
motivation for this is to ensure
proper startup and shutdown so that this process can be automated. If
we have to manually execute
'kill', the automation of this tomcat process will be problematic.
(2) Everytime after a fresh restart of tomcat, when I hit the first
page of my installed xwiki, I almost always
get a connection reset error. But the second hit will be ok. I wonder
why? Any answers to this?
(3) The WYSIWYG support is a nightmare. Everytime after an edit
(even a mere clicking on the WYSIWYG link without edit
will cause similar problems), all the formatting that used to work
suddenly don't and user have to manually reformat it. How to make
WYSIWYG rendering consistent?
(4) Customization of user registration field - we spend hours trying
to figure out how to customize the
fields which we would like to have in our registration page. Only
managed to get the attributes added
into the XWiki.XWikiUsers object. But how to link this to stats/user
profile edit page? Any ideas? Also
it seem like after an attribute is added to the XWikiUsers object, it
can't be removed. Any ideas on
how to remove it? Documentation on customization of user registration
page is just a one liner which
is totally useless to anyone who want to customize it. It should be
improved.
(5) When using Oracle as backend, search functions cannot work.
Exception like this occurred when user
perform search:
Exception while searching documents with sql from VisitStats as obj
where obj.cookie=? and obj.endDate > ? order by obj.endDate desc
Wrapped Exception: could not execute query
Any way to get this search function working?
(6) Every now and then, log file will throws exceptions like this:
java.sql.SQLException: ORA-00932: inconsistent datatypes: expected - got
CLOB
Any idea what is the cause of it and how to resolve it?
All in all, xwiki presents a great opportunity that meets many
organization knowledge management needs (esp. in my organization). But
until all these problems are being resolved, I am amazed by the large
number of user web sites that used xwiki in a production environment.
In my limited experience with xwiki thus far (closed to 3 months of
working on it), the support requirements of xwiki would be such
a big problems that it will make anyone think twice to adopt it as
enterprise knowledge management system. I certainly is reconsidering
other wiki consequently of all these problems.
My company uses mediawiki as well. While don't have the nice
authentications and authorizations features like xwiki (which we like to
have),
it is extremely stable and easy to use.
---
Jenson GOH (Mr) :: Manager (IT), CORS, Registrar's Office. Resident
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