Re: [xwiki-users] Bunch of questions related to search

Wishing all XWiki users and developers a very happy new year. ----- Original Message ---- Guillaume, I was attracted by the feature/capabilities advertised for XE. I was supporting a small user base earlier and TWiki/Foswiki was satisfactory from a performance and customization stand point. But now I am tasked to deploy a wiki for a much larger user base (~ 1000-2000 to begin with and likely to grow) and to host documentation/processes for multiple projects. I was not too confident about Foswiki's scalability -- because of use of flat directory structure and simple RCS based version control. XWiki's use of database for backend storage and use of cutting edge web technologies made me believe it had the capability to scale for our needs. The possibility of virtual wikis and clustering were especially attractive. The ability to search through attachments (using Lucene) and the programmabliity offered via Velocity and Groovy makes XWiki much more powerful than the plugin functionality of Foswiki. Foswiki's template system doesn't seem to be an elegant foundation -- it is quite confusing to specify the correct syntax for quote marks. The support for forms is also inelegant because the form fields are stored as meta fields in the page content which limits the data types that one can store in forms. I think xwiki doesn't have that limitation. To point out the shortcomings of XWiki: the learning curve to deploy and gain admin knowledge for XWiki seems much steeper than I anticipated. More detailed documentation can certainly help, but I also understand that this should be a collective effort. Some of the features from Foswiki that I would earnestly request to be supported in Xwiki are: 1. Provide ability for end users to easily view access controls at page, space and wiki levels and browse groups. Presently only admingroup users can view access controls and groups. And the irritating behavior is that bin/view/XWiki/XWikiPreferences gets redirected to bin/admin/XWiki/XWikiPreferences. 2. A vacation planner or vacation view application where users can specify their vacation or remote-working plans in their individual home pages and the ability to view the status of any individual or arbitrary group of individuals. This is highly desired by the managers at my work place. I think this request appears in the list of requested features, but I haven't seen any timeline when this will be available. 3. Ability to generate an access control report for any page. The corporate IT security team requires such a report for audit purposes. I'll let you know more as I go through the learning process :) Thanks, Milind