21 Apr
2017
21 Apr
'17
1:52 p.m.
On Fri, Apr 21, 2017 at 2:16 PM, Vincent Massol <vincent(a)massol.net> wrote:
Hi Caty,
On 21 Apr 2017, at 12:44, Ecaterina Moraru
(Valica) <valicac(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
Let's see what variants we have:
1. Instead of displaying "Title", display the "Name" instead.
This won't solve anything. There is no difference between Page Name and
Page Title for the normal users. Seeing "Name" instead of "Title",
will
not
stop the users to enter spaces if they want, so
the URL will still have
those spaces. We don't force the Page Names to trim spaces.
One quick solution here is indeed to use "URL" label instead of
"Name".
For
the reasons Vincent mentioned this might not end
up in the product for
now,
What did I mention? :) What’s preventing us from having it in the product
rather soon than later (except workload ofc)?
so you will need to do some custom development
(changing some
translations)
to have this change. If you want to be
"hackish" you can even change the
translation for "Title" to "URL" instead and hope that your users
will
enter shorter URLs (since we generate the name from the title).
Displaying just Name / URL, means users will still have to go and change
the title manually.
This could be better (with URL name) since when you create a page you’re
offered the ability to change the title after you click Create.
The only way to cut a step in the flow is to
autogenerate the page names (which we currently do). But for your use
case
you shoyld write a shorting/trimming algorithm,
but this is custom, since
you mentioned you want just the initials and no spaces, etc.
2. Displaying both "Title" and "Name". This will create confusion and
need
for explanations.
This is not exactly what is suggested either by Vishal nor by me :) What
we suggested is to let the user enter the URL name and title.
Actually and to be more precise what I was suggesting was to continue to
let the user enter the title but to show the generated URL as it’s done in
AWM. And, importantly to allow the user to change the last part of the URL
(it would change the page name).
That's why we display these options just for
advanced and
long-time users of XWiki, since they are used to the concepts.
Yes but URLs don't need an advanced user to
understand the concept and I
agree with Vishal that we’re now causing a very large number of pages to
have %25 in their URLs by default which is quite bad… Of course someone can
spend their time monitoring what users are doing and renaming pages
thereafter or educate their users to do that but we’re not helping and
we’re making it difficult.
If your web site is not in English then you're forced to use special
characters like diacritics which makes it hard to avoid URL encoded
characters (the browser location bar displays the URL nicely but if you
copy the URL the result is not nice).
-----
IMO what you are describing is advanced user behavior. Normal users don't
generally care about their URLs and SEO.
I don’t fully agree with you. I have the feeling (can’t prove it) that a
good number of our users care about the generated URLs.
Also I think that simple users may care about URL
without being advanced
users. Making them advanced users will expose them to a lot more complexity
than they need to know.
But the beauty of XWiki is that
you can customize it locally to perfectly match your needs.
That’s not exactly true (and it’s far from being easy, just check
createinline.vm): It means overriding large portions of vm code and having
to do manual merges whenever you upgrade. A major PITA.
Vincent mentioned something about AWM. I
don't see much difference from
the
Create Page. We generate the names from title
here too. We display them
in
the breadcrumb, but in a more simple way.
Displaying the
"localhost"/server
part is not simple user behavior. AWM is more
complex.
-----
So I would not change anything on the product side, since I believe these
should be solved as custom changes for your instance.
We want to encourage users to use page titles (with spaces in them since
they are more readable and supported), while we are preserving the page
name behavior for advances users (but we don't enforce it).
I don’t agree with this sentence: We definitely don’t want to encourage
users to use titles in URLs.
If users made
mistakes they can always change the title or rename the page.
On the product side the only change I would like us to do is using the
URL
naming, but this was debated in the past and
dropped for Vincent's
reasons.
What reasons, I don’t remember a discussion about using URL name instead
of page name?
So our main disagreement is that I consider that favouring encoded
characters in URLs is not a good thing while you think it’s not a large
enough problem to do something about it.
Would it make our UI too complex to use for simple users if we were
showing a URL and the ability to change the last part of it? IMO what’s
complex is when we have Page name and Page Title. But I don’t feel there’d
be confusion between URL and Page title.
What do others think?
Thanks
-Vincent
Thanks,
Caty
On Thu, Apr 20, 2017 at 11:57 PM, Vincent Massol <vincent(a)massol.net>
wrote:
>
>> On 20 Apr 2017, at 22:51, Vincent Massol <vincent(a)massol.net> wrote:
>>
>> Hi Vishal,
>>
>> Ok, I misunderstood you in your first email. I understood the opposite.
> I thought you were complaining that have 2 notions (page name + page
title)
> was confusing but it’s actually the opposite!
What you find confusing is
> the fact that it’s not easy for your users to set both the page name and
> page titles!
>>
>> It’s funny (or not :)) since this is exactly what we had in past
> versions of XWiki and we had several complaints that it was confusing to
> have the 2 notions and this is why he hid the page name only for
advanced
> users.
>
> Actually, if I remember well, what we were doing was to ask for the page
> name and we were setting the title to the same as the page name by
default
> and then the user could edit the title before
saving the page.
>
> We’ve now done the opposite (user deciding on the title and page name
> being derived from it) but leading to the issue you’re raising about URL
> SEO…
>
> Thanks
> -Vincent
>
>> See below.
>>
>>> On 20 Apr 2017, at 14:20, Vishal <thewikinoteorg(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Thanks Vincent for your thorough reply..
>>> You guessed it right. We intend to have clean and short urls for SEO
>>> reasons.
>>> Current scheme creates two problems:
>>>
>>> 1) The Page name is fetched automatically from the Title. Often the
> titles
>>> have spaces which translate as *percent characters *in url which makes
> it
>>> somewhat unclean :)
>>
>> Indeed you’re right. By hiding the page name we’re now incitating to
> have longer URLs and encoded characters showing up in URLs which is not
> nice I agree.
>>
>> Maybe one solution is to do something similar to what we do in AWM,
i.e.
> generate automatically the URL from the title
entered by the user and
show
> the resulting URL to the user and give the
user the opportunity to
change
> the URL.
>>
>> See http://extensions.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/download/Extension/
> App%20Within%20Minutes%20Application/AppWithinMinutes-Step1.png
>>
>>> 2) Secondly, to have the shorter url, we use only the short forms of
>>> complete title.
>>> Ex. For title 'Pune University' we use name PU.
>>
>> Hey, you’re from Pune? :) I’ve been there about 15 times! That was in a
> previous job where my company and KPIT Cummins were partners.
>>
>>> Otherwise in this hierarchy of pages, the url would be much longer.
>>> Ex. We have page 'Electronics and Telecommunications' branch under
page
>>> 'Pune University'. We should
not have such a long url. Instead here we
> need
>>> PU/ENTC or Pune-University/ENTC
>>>
>>> To avoid all this, what we currently do:
>>> 1) On create page dialog, use PU as title.. This will create url as
PU.
>>> If full name is used here as title,
we need to use - instead of spaces
> to
>>> avoid percent characters in url.
>>> 2) While in edit mode, change the title back to Pune University.
Remove
> any
>>> - characters to make title clean.
>>> This is where confusion creeps in.
>>>
>>> If these two terms create confusion, why I need to show them both:
>>> I guess the *confusion is due to term Name*. It doesn't reflect actual
> usage
>>> of the term. URL or weblink or link or web address would be more apt
> terms
>>> to use to instead of Name.
>>
>> Regarding Page name vs Page URL.
>>
>> A bit of history: The reason we used page name and not page URL
> originally is because what the user is creating is a document in the
> database and initially it was called Document Name. Since that was a bit
> confusing for users, we had decided to call it Page Name. It just
happened
> that the URL used was directly derived from
the document/page name.
>>
>> In practice the 3 concepts could have different values:
>> * a value for the document’s name in the DB
>> * another value for the document’s title
>> * yet another value used in the URL.
>>
>> We’ve had discussions so that we could let the user provide shorter
URLs
> for pages in the future.
>>
>> Now for the time being and since we don’t have this ATM, I think I
agree
> with you that we could decide to display to
the user the URL that will
be
> generated (the encoded URL) and allow the
user to change it. Internally
the
> user would change the document name.
>>
>>> My users can differentiate between Title and URL. But the whole
> procedure we
>>> follow is certainly not understandable by all. And we definitely need
to
>>> follow this whole long procedure,
just to have short and clean urls.
>>
>> Yes, if you’re asking your users to care about the URLs that get
> generated, right now they need to be advanced users to be able to edit
the
> page name in the Create Page UI (since
changing the title afterwards is
too
> cumbersome).
>>
>>> So, by showing both fields at the first place itself, I would like to
>>> shorten the procedure and url length.
>>
>> I’m in agreement with you. Let’s see what others think.
>>
>> Thanks for this interesting discussion!
>> -Vincent
>>
>>> --
>>> View this message in context: http://xwiki.475771.n2.nabble.
> com/Page-Title-and-Name-confusion-tp7603546p7603551.html
>>> Sent from the XWiki- Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>
>