24 Jan
2010
24 Jan
'10
8:38 p.m.
Hi Rick,
On Jan 24, 2010, at 7:50 PM, Rick Hadsall wrote:
Well,
it's probably too soon to tell as I'm very new with XWiki and very
comfortable with Confluence. My sense is that XWiki has a long way to
go - Confluence's markup language is excellent,
In term of markup language, we had XWiki syntax 1.0 which was close to confluence's
syntax (since both depended on Radeox). However we've seen lots of limitations and
have created XWiki Syntax 2.0 which we believe is the most powerful markup language
(basically we can do back and forth from HTML and not loose content which isn't true
for the other syntaxes we know of).
The new syntax is described here:
http://platform.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/XWikiSyntax
I'd be happy to know if you still think there are things better done in the confluence
syntax and that xwiki's syntax cannot do (I believe the opposite is true).
Also, to be noted, is that XWiki is polyglot ie it supports several syntaxes, amongst
which Confluence syntax (although if you use it you won't be able to use our new
WYSIWYG editor since right now it only supports XWiki Syntax 1.0).
Guillaume Lerouge wrote:
First let me thank you a lot for the feedback, that's really useful for us.
Yes, definitely. The blog actually used to do this but we changed it some
time ago because when content got truncated sometimes markup was no longer
closed properly, which led to wome weird display on the blog homepage (half
of the text getting underlined, stuff like that).
With the new rendering engine, it could be possible to write a "smart"
snippet algorithm that would cut the markup in the right place. In the
default version, you'll notice that if you manually fill the "summary"
field
of a blog post it gets displayed on the blog homepage instead of the actual
article content, which I believe is close to the behavior you're looking
for. If that's what you want to do, follow the indications on
http://code.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Applications/BlogApplication to create
a blog out of any page.
OK. I'll give this a try. In theory the engine could be smart enough
to know if it is going to truncate in the middle of markup and adjust
accordingly, but having people provide a summary is a decent alternative.
But what I'm trying to do is create the blogs, but then be able to list
the blogs on another regular wiki/content page - either in a list or a
summary format. I don't want to force the user to go to the "blog" page
to get the teasers for that content - I'd like to be able to tease the
content on another page or two (where relevant, by category, or blog,
etc) and let them click to read the full thing.
> By the way, I'd be interested in hearing your feedback about XWiki as
> compared to Confluence. Specifically, if you were to name one thing you like
> best in XWiki vs Confluence and one thing you like best in Confluence
> compared to XWiki, what would those be? and you can do pretty
much anything you want with the macros they provide and the parameters
for them.
I agree that confluence has an edge in term of number of macros. Where XWiki catches up I
believe is with the ability to write velocity/groovy/ruby/python scripts directly in pages
along with a powerful API accessible from theses scripting language which makes it
relatively easy to script any missing macro. However this is no substitute for more macros
since standard users may not have the skills to write such scripts.
For example with the blog issue you simply use the
blog macro
on any page and pass it the parameters for which blogs you want
(category, space, date ranges, what kind of listing, etc) and voila.
I remember using the confluence blog a long time ago (around 2005) and I didn't like
it because it was something part of the Confluence core and you couldn't modify it to
your needs. For example it had not ability to modify the date of a post (that's
probably been added since then) and there was no way I could add it (except to go in java
dev mode and rewrite the blog provided I had access to the sources). In XWiki the blog
application is contained in wiki pages and you can edit them and modify them to suit your
exact needs, where needed.
In due time we'll probably make the most obvious features available directly as macros
or as configuration options but this example highlights one main difference of confluence
vs xwiki IMO. Confluence is done well and for a usage in mind, XWiki is a toolbox/platform
with powerful APIs. A few years back XWiki was hard for its users since it was powerful
but you needed knowledge to benefit from this power. However for the past 3 years
we've focused on usability and it's starting to show. We still have the powerful
engine but now features are also much more accessible/usable than before. Obviously there
are always improvements to be done and we have lots of ideas on stuff to do :)
There's no need to know Velocity to do anything so
you don't have all
this code that regular editors and site maintainers won't ever have a
prayer of knowing all over the place.
Right...
XWiki's preview doesn't work
correctly - often you will preview and want to go back to editor and
it's broken. For example, edit a blog and then preview, and when you go
back to edit it will have a different look (no 'summary' and 'content'
pane, just one pane, and an error in it). Very annoying.
This is strange. Could it be that you're using a version of XWiki where the blog was
still using the old wysiwyg editor? What version of XWiki Enterprise are you using?
The number of
plug-ins and add-ons to confluence is massive - it allows a richness of
content that is unmatched by pretty much any other product on the
market.
Yep, see above.
It's something that, if I were XWiki, I would
target to make
plugins compatible with Confluence's.
Yes we wanted to do this at one point but it's not something easy to do. We'd need
a confluence runtime, ie implement all APIs available from confluence plugins which is
probably the whole platform if we wanted to be 100% compatible.
Confluence's permissions seem to
be easier to use and apply to discrete pages, spaces, and functions
within than pretty much any other product's.
I also agree here. XWiki permissions are probably more powerful but still too complex to
use. We have scheduled to work on this in the near future.
Confluence's macros around
inclusion of Confluence content really set it apart from XWiki. Pretty
much anything in Confluence can be included on a page through a macro.
That's something that really helps. I know you can code it in XWiki but
that really is not something that makes sense for a site managed by end
users.
See:
http://platform.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/XWikiSyntax
versus
http://sandbox.onconfluence.com/renderer/notationhelp.action?section=all
Yes I know this confluence page but you shouldn't compare it with our syntax page. On
our syntax page we only describe the syntax not macros (we only refer to it).
Our macro page is here:
http://code.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Macros/
I agree that the presentation is nicer on the confluence page though and I agree it coud
be good idea that we dynamically include macro description directly in that syntax help
page.
Note that there are also confluence macros that map to XWiki applications. For example the
confluence dynamictasklist probably maps to our Task application:
http://code.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Applications/TaskManagerApplication
(for other apps see http://code.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Applications/ )
The panels on XWiki are awesome. That's really an
easy way to create
that sort of thing - Confluence can't do it - you have to do sections
and such and it's not perfect. You can do it, but it's not as easy as
XWiki's.
cool.
Again- take with a bit of a grain of salt because
I'm much, much more
familiar with Confluence. I'm using XWiki for a client who doesn't want
to pay the license fee, which is a major advantage for XWiki. But right
now, it's not quite there as far as ease of use or richness/completeness
of features.
Again thanks for the feedback. What I think is:
* several parts of the power of xwiki doesn't shine enough in ithe documentation (or
is too scaterred to perceive immediately)
* confluence has many macros and we should definitely take time to boost our number of
macros (especially since it's very easy to do with our wiki macros notions - not sure
if you've seen that one, it's awesome - see
http://platform.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/DevGuide/WikiMacroTutorial )
* XWiki is still a bit more tech oriented than confluence is, even though we're
progressing fast in this domain, from release to release. The 2.2 release (which is almost
ready) has several new stuff in this regard: new profile UI, improved menus, wiki macros
in wiki farms, etc)
Now let's focus on your need for blog macros and let's write them. I'm pretty
sure they are only a few lines of velocity which we can then wrap in a wiki macro.
Thanks Rick
-Vincent