6 Dec
2010
6 Dec
'10
11:52 a.m.
Hi!
Mark D. Anderson wrote:
hi -
I'm one of the stranded former users of the free hosted service wik.is
which mindtouch precipitously cancelled, forcing all users to either go
to one of their paid plans (which don't match my usage), or leave.
I'm going to host it myself this time, and have been looking through
the alternatives. I'm attracted to xwiki for several reasons:
full ACL support; ldap authentication; good open source license without
a bunch of proprietary features; Balsamiq and Word integrations;
wysiwyg editing; and strong REST api.
Without considering the available code, just to say that any single
piece of information associated with a document can be used to
programmatically display any bunch of selected documents in a new one.
The homepage of a document is a clear field to be used as ID, but any
identifiable content or object property could be used.
From my first glance I do still have some
reservations:
1. One concern is convenient maintenance of sorted children.
I see that in xwiki's own documentation wiki, this isn't done:
http://platform.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/AdminGuide/
is just maintained manually as an index page.
As far as I can tell, by default children are just sorted by creation order.
With the http://code.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Plugins/DocumentTreePlugin
they can instead be sorted by name.
Lastly, there is http://code.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Plugins/SortedDocumentTreePlugin
But I really don't understand the instructions for "importing" a class to
get
an additional sortable attribute.
Also I don't know if these plugins support sort order of spaces too, or not.
Ideally, however it is done, when a page is created, the form would have not
only the page title and parent title, but a place for an optional sort value.
2. I'd like to be able to export an entire space
as a big PDF.
I can't tell if this plugin will do that:
http://code.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Applications/PDFExportPanelApplication
For example, suppose I wanted the whol xwiki AdminGuide as a single PDF,
what would I do?
To the best of my knowledge, this is not possible with the available
plugins or applications. You can export as PDF a document, but not space
or any other "artefact" you could create as a multi-chapter document
metaphor. This nice application eases the use of some features related
with document export.
I would keep track of the development of nested spaces features and some
other initiatives to add new hierarchy to XWiki documents. Also, an
understanding of the new rendering architecture will be required to get
something working on this field...
http://code.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Modules/RenderingModule
3. I'd like a real bare bones look -- even slimmer than Confluence or MediaWiki,
and both of those are a little less cluttered than the Toucan skin.
I'm not finding any example skins that are like that.
This is really easy. Check this thread...
http://markmail.org/thread/n5i7mammmo63dcz6
As Vincent said, check some samples here...
http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/Screenshots
4. I like the idea of supporting office app clients.
But it seems there is some clumsiness with XOffice specifying a parent:
http://jira.xwiki.org/jira/browse/XOFFICE-243
And I can't find any documentation on editing/creating content from OpenOffice
and/or via any webdav client. Things like URL conventions, etc.
This page http://platform.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/DevGuide/Architecture
mentions XOO (Xwiki OpenOffice) but there is nothing else about it:
http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/Search?text=XOO&wikinames=&…
5. I might be blind but I can't find any documentation for the blogging support.
http://code.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Applications/BlogApplication
6. The page http://code.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Plugins/
says "Components" are preferred over plugins but the link to
"Components" goes nowhere.
http://code.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Modules/ComponentModule
In general the documentation wiki is pretty confusing.
The Enterprise docs link to basically
all the same places as the platform docs. There seems to be a mixture of information that
is
years out of date and information about ideas not yet implemented. Sadly it is an
example
of the dangers of using a wiki :(.
-mda
Well, I could agree with you and I can also feel the same danger of
using a wiki you are speaking about. The point is that XWiki is a
collaborative initiative. Developers are mostly devoted to develop (sic)
new great features and it could be truth that the documentation is a bit
messy. But I'm sure, better I can confirm, that any initiative/idea will
be welcome and carefully considered for the community. Mainly, for the
developers themselves. Please, browse through users lists and Jira
repository to check how many times several aspects related with
documentation have been discussed. Even some proposals about ideas like
"bug fixing day" or "documentation day" (sorry, I don't remember
if they
were called exactly that way!)
XWiki is a great framework requiring men/women work force to improve
some aspects. Documentation is one of them!
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HTH!
Ricardo
--
Ricardo Rodríguez
CTO
eBioTIC.
Life Sciences, Data Modeling and Information Management Systems