24 Jan
2010
24 Jan
'10
8:54 p.m.
Vincent Massol wrote:
XWiki Enterprise 2.1.25683
Yes, that's the problem. Perhaps a JAR with a package that would allow
developers to map functions or something- something to make it easier to
port to XWiki. If it's easy, they'll do it. Since many (most??)
Confluence add-ons are open source you guys could do 5-10 and release
them with lots of code comments and documentation to show how easy it
is. One thing that is clear is that XWiki CAN do whatever Confluence can.
First let me thank you a lot for the feedback, that's really useful for us.
No problem. As I continue to learn I'll give more.
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).
Cheers, Vincent. I'll take a look at this in more depth. One question
- does the WYSIWYG support pages that use the XWiki Syntax 2.0 though?
I'd avoid using confluence syntax on XWiki personally, and will
recommend my users to do the same.
Note: I am having trouble right now having two separate named blogs in
one space. I figured out how to do it in theory by renaming "Blog" to
whatever I want it to be, but since it relies heavily on templates and
what not from the Blog _space_, it doesn't actually work in practice.
But I will mess with the macros to see if this is necessary because if I
can control the display of blog teasers by category using an XWiki
macro, I'll do that.
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.
Inline scripting is a bad idea, though. But one thing that you might
want to do - and maybe you have it already, but the default pages don't
seem to make use of it - it allow user macros and global macros that are
code/markup/macros that can be referred to as a standard XWiki macro w/
parameters. Confluence does this - you can put the scripting and stuff
in the user macro or the space macro - which isn't Java code, but this
kind of code - and then users use the resulting macro w/ parameters in
the actual pages. This is much better as it's easier for end-users to
understand and work with. Code inline in the page - they'll just back
away from the keyboard and call someone else, which defeats the purpose.
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.
No, I think even in 3.1 you can't back-date the blog post, which is
stupid. I really like that you can do that - we're starting a new site,
we have extant blog posts - I want to preserve the continuity. Can't do
that on Confluence, so you're correct.
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?
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.
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.
That's great news!
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/ )
I'll check this out more too, thank you. I missed that entirely.
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)
This might be your biggest weakness. The documentation was VERY
frustrating as a first time user to navigate through. It seemed it was
nearly empty - took a long time to even find the syntax pages and I
missed the macros pages, and the videos seemed to be all that there was,
and I really dislike videos so I tend to overlook that. I want
something I can have open in a new window and tab back and forth to.
More examples would help too - One of the things I'm going to need to do
is sort out how to re-do the look and feel of the site to remove the
"wiki" look and feel for most of it, as I'm using XWiki as a platform
for content management as well as a Wiki, which will actually only be a
small part of the site. There aren't many themes/etc available to
download (unless, again, I'm missing something) and I can't find
detailed documentation on how to do this.
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.
Yes, it'd be great to just do :
{blog:space=whatever|name=blogname|category=this,that|datefrom=optional|dateto=optional|max=#|displaytype=(full,summary,list)}
and have it.
One thing I'm also not clear how to do is if I wanted to put up a form
on a page that collects some information and then e-mails it to someone
(e.g., a request for information form) - is that something I can even do
at all? That would be okay to have scripting since it'd need CAPTCHA
and all that.
Rick